MOTHER UTTERS: STRUGGLE AND SUBVERSION
IN THE WORKS OF GWENDOLYN BROOKS
A Dissertation
Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies and Research
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Kamal Ud Din
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
December 2008
© 2008 by Kamal ud Din
All Rights Reserved
ii
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
School of Graduate Studies and Research
Department of English
We hereby approve the dissertation of
Kamal ud Din
Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
______________________
____________________________________
Kenneth Sherwood, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English, Advisor
____________________________________
Veronica Watson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
____________________________________
Michael T. Williamson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
ACCEPTED
___________________________________ _____________________
Michele S. Schwietz, Ph.D.
Assistant Dean for Research
The School of Graduate Studies and Research
iii
Title: Mother Utters: Struggle and Subversion in the Works of Gwendolyn Brooks
Author: Kamal ud Din
Dissertation Chair: Dr. Kenneth Sherwood
Dissertation Committee Members:
Dr. Veronica Watson
Dr. Michael T. Williamson
“Mother Utters: Struggle and Subversion in the Works of Gwendolyn Brooks”
explores how Brooks uses women's speech and traditional classical poetic forms to
struggle with and subvert the predominant social, moral, and political systems which
impede class mobility and oppress African Americans in general and African American
women in particular. To transform the identity and role of African American women,
Brooks assigns central roles to women, particularly to mothers, in most of her early
works. In this way, she brings them from invisibility to visibility and from objects to
subjects. In order to analyze these works and this phenomenon, particularly, I utilize
Black Feminist theory.
Brooks’s poetry also reflects the fine blending of classical and popular poetic
forms. The tension between aesthetic and politics is one of the prominent features of
Brooks’s works. I explore how she skillfully and artistically transforms classical poetic
forms, such as the sonnet and ballad, and uses them to protest against and destabilize the
preexisting value systems and also how she maintains a delicate balance between
aesthetic and politics in her poems.
In her 1968 volume In the Mecca, we find a shift in her art of narration: The use
of diverse subjects, interior speech and polyvocality in this dramatic poem enable it to
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operate on many levels. I investigate what this shift in the narration signifies and how it
effects her poetic and political vision. Maud Martha, Brooks’s sole novel enhances the
themes of resistance and subversion that we find in her first two volumes of poetry. It
also heralds the idea of an essential “sanity.” I also look at Brooks’s works from multisocial and cross-cultural context with the help of Bakhtin’s theory of “dialogism.” I try to
understand Brooks’s women in relation to Pakistani social and cultural contexts and
explore the feasibility of teaching Brooks to Pakistani students at the end of the
dissertation.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Dedication: To my wife Naveeda and all my children
I am thankful to all my friends in Indiana, Pennsylvania for their moral support and
cooperation, which helped me to finish my doctoral program without any problems. I
shall never forget the initial support and help given to me by Abdul Rahman of Saudi
Arabia. I should thank all the professors who guided and helped me during my stay at
Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I want to thank especially Dr. Susan Gatti and Dr.
Karen Dandurand for their timely help and guidance in every semester. I owe my
gratitude to the staff of Disability Support Services of Indiana University of
Pennsylvania, particularly to Dr. Todd Van Wieren, who has always helped me to get
books from Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic, to get the books recorded, provided
library assistance, and arranged the recorders for me. I am grateful to the staff of the
Stapleton Library for their cooperation and assistance in finding the books and articles.
I am thankful to Dr. Kenneth Sherwood, my dissertation director whose scholarship and
patient guidance enabled me to accomplish my goal. I am grateful to Dr. Veronica
Watson and Dr. Michael T. Williamson, the members of the dissertation committee,
whose comments and suggestions helped me to look at Gwendloyn Brooks from a new
angle. I am also grateful to all my friends who helped me to maintain my computer and
assisted me in finding online materials. I am obliged to Crystal Hoffman who helped me
as the proofreader; I have no word to thank her for her earnest efforts.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
Page
I.
INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1
II.
MOTHER TRANSFORMED: VOICES OF PROTEST
AND SUBVERSION .................................................................................. 29
III. TRADITIONS TRANSFORMED: FORMS OF PROTEST
IN THE EARLY POETRY ......................................................................... 74
IV. DISPERSED NARRATION: SHIFT IN THE MECCA .......................... 115
V.
MAUD MARTHA: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN'S
ATTAINMENT OF VOICE ..................................................................... 159
VI. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................ 189
WORKS CITED ....................................................................................... 198
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Since I was a young man, I have believed, with no uncertain conviction, that
women are a source of unparalleled strength. Women are and always have been capable
of bringing about change in the lives of individuals, families, entire communities through
the strength of their indomitable will, integrity of character, and moral vision. This is
what I have learned from my eldest sister, who became a widow only three years after her
marriage. My sister was never cowed by unfavorable social and financial circumstances
or by the challenges of a society that looks down upon women as irrational and good for
nothing aside from child rearing and other domestic work. She not only proved what she
was capable of as a woman, but she also educated and trained her two daughters to defy
and resist oppression and injustice with grace and dignity. She had always been a source
of inspiration for me and she has instilled in me the belief that women are not poor,
delicate, weak creatures who must depend on men for their survival. They are also not
destined to walk a few steps behind men; rather they are their equals and can be as good
as men in every area of life, given equal opportunity and freedom to exercise their
potential. The only thing that makes them an “other,” a second class citizen, is the
preexisting system, which evolved through patriarchy and conservatism. Whenever I
think of my sister, I am reminded of the gender oppression, discrimination, and the way
images are imposed upon women.
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The women of Pakistan, like women of everywhere, have yearned for identities
apart from the ones that have been imposed on them by the values and systems
established by men. For we can hear some stray voices of Muslim women of this region
of the earth, even in the beginning of the twentieth century, asserting their dreams and
aspirations openly, or under a pen name from which it is difficult to determine their
gender identity. However, Pakistani feminist writers are now trying to change the female
identity imposed by social, cultural, religious, tribal, and regional customs and traditions
in an organized way. They are struggling to transform their image and role in Pakistani
society and culture, as well as in the international community. Pakistani feminist writers
have realized that to destabilize the preexisting social and cultural systems that have
reduced them to domestics, nurses of their husbands and children, and invisible members
of the family and society, women must have a voice of their own to articulate their
feelings. They must have the power to assert themselves. The efforts of Pakistani feminist
writers are to establish new identities as dignified, self-confident, and liberated human
beings with the power to articulate themselves and be heard. Now we can hear the voices
suggesting, and even demanding, their equal rights, recognition of their existence, and the
end of gender oppression and discriminatory laws. It is true that some privileged women
in Pakistani society enjoy relative social, political, and economic freedom and civil
rights, but the majority of Pakistani women who are illiterate or poorly educated and
without any regular source of income are still deprived of their rights and denied any
respectable and dignified identity. If Pakistani feminists want to see their dreams of
freedom and respect and empowerment for women in Pakistan, they need to bring the
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women of the under classes into their folds and include them in their fight against the
gender and class oppression and discrimination.
In reality Pakistani society and culture, have tolerant and flexible dimensions.
They profess and teach their members to respect women and honor their rights, as
defined in the Holy Koran. It has defined in clear terms their basic civic rights as the
members of a society, as mothers, as wives, as sisters, as daughters, and as neighbors.
The prophet of Islam also urges his followers to respect women, treat them kindly, and
give them the rights that are due to them. But, unfortunately these teachings and
education of the Holy Book and school text books are either completely overlooked or
misinterpreted by the so called guardians of society and culture. They highlight the
injunctions of the Holy Book that suit their purpose, and emphasize those verses that
speak of restrictions and prohibitions on women but, play down those verses which give
them permission to acquire knowledge and education, in order to perform their duties as
active members of a society, as well as their role as teachers and nation builders. Feminist
writers in Pakistan are struggling to transform the role and image of Pakistani women.
They are challenging and subverting traditional ideas and value systems, which mostly
belong to regional and tribal social customs and traditions. These primitive and
conservative cultural values are responsible for rendering Pakistani women identitiless
members of the family, as well as the sole property of men. Social, religious, and cultural
norms have defined, in theory, the roles, responsibilities, rights, and obligations of both
men and women. These norms have promised equal opportunity for both sexes.
Theoretically, the laws of the country grant all social, political, legal, and civil rights to
3
women, and they have the right to acquire knowledge, and even have access to higher
education and can adopt the professions of their choice. However, some members of
society, with their preconceived ideas of women - based on male chauvinism, tribal
customs, and patriarchal values- are responsible for depriving women of their rights and
due status.
At present, according to Zamir Badyyuni,Pakistani feminism seems to be
influenced by Anglo-American feminism and French feminism, for Black Feminism is
rarely mentioned. However, Black feminism is a powerful movement and, in my opinion,
is capable of giving new inspiration and vision to Pakistani feminists, who have not
confined themselves to the educated middle classes, but are speaking for the underprivileged, poor, and semi-literate urban and rural women, who are struggling against
gender oppression, as well as caste and class discrimination. Moreover, Black Feminism,
as Alice Walker envisaged, stresses self-determination, appreciation for all aspects of
womanhood, and the commitment to the survival of both men and women. It is meant for
not only African American women, but also women of color, regardless of their race or
region. Alice Walker’s vision of “womanism” urges African American women not to
limit themselves to a specific geographical boundary, but rather link themselves with
humanity at large, especially with women the world over.
Gwendolyn Brooks, the Poet Laureate for the State of Illinois, a teacher, and the
first African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize, has been a prolific writer. She
wrote and published more than twenty collections of poetry, including A Street in
Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), In the Mecca (1968), and a fictional work, Maud
4
Martha (1953), in rapid succession. Her poetry is a subtle blending of traditional forms
such as ballads, sonnets, and popular and folk literary forms like rhythm of the blues and
unrestricted free verse. In short, the popular as well as classical forms of English poetry
are used in her work. Her poetry is characterized by innovation and experimentation as
she juxtaposes lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetic forms. Her lyrics are marked by
affirmation of life despite the social and economic oppression; the subject matter of her
narrative poetry deals with simple stories of common men and women, but it has a
universal appeal; her dramatic poetry is peopled by ordinary characters and it describes
actions that are not heroic. Their struggle to survive in the hostile and inimical world
makes them memorable and their action lofty. Brooks’ works depict African-American
life and culture, and they are bitter and scathing commentary on the impact of social,
political, economic, and racial discrimination, on African American women. They also
give a vivid picture of the social and economic pressures that have stunted their class
mobility as well as the glimpses of African-Americans’ day-to-day existence.
Brooks is not only just a successful American poet of the twentieth Century in
literary terms, but her voice in the struggle for social and racial equality and justice
particularly for African American women is also powerful. She holds the mirror with the
reflection of the world around her, so that others may see the ugly and unpleasant realities
of a ghetto world. Despite the sordid life and tedious questions, the vision and themes of
her poems are not pessimistic. Her themes include the transformation of African
American identity from denigrated to dignified, and the search for happiness despite the
oppressions of racism and poverty. She is a powerful voice for social equality, political
5
justice, and economic mobility for both African American men and women, especially
during the critical times in social and political history, particularly during the days of the
civil rights movement.
I have chosen to apply Black Feminist theory because its professed aims are to
create unity among oppressed and marginalized women, regardless of their class, color,
caste, or creed. This theory also emphasizes women’s need for a voice of their own if
African American women, that is to say, every woman who is facing discrimination and
oppression, are to transform their identity and role in their society. bell hooks, in her
book, Talking Back draws the attention of the reader to this need for “finding a voice” as
“metaphor for self-transformation” (12). Advocates of Black Feminism, like Mae
Henderson, urge black women to acquire expression that will transform them from
individuals being defined to the definers, from objectivity to subjectivity, and from
addressee to speaker.
Black Feminism aims at changing the denigrated images of African American
women and presents them as respectable, confident, and proud women with a solid and
fervent social and political consciousness. It envisages coexistence and cooperation, not
confrontation between sexes. hooks, in her book, Feminism is for Everybody, addresses
men, assuring them that they can also play a positive role in the Black Feminist
movement. She remarks, "’enlightened’ feminists see that men are not the problem, that
the problems are patriarchy, sexism, and male domination” (67). The crux of hooks’ ideas
about Black Feminism is that "feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression" (6). Its
aim is to create awareness of the various factors of oppression and how society idealizes
6
the oppressors and its oppressive values. The Combahee River Collective Statement also
sets forth similar ideas in its statement defining its goals,
The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be
that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual,
heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the
development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that
the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these
oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see
Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold
and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. (Combahee)
The main aim of Black Feminism may be understood as this: first struggle against
racist and sexist oppression; second, find a black female voice, in order to articulate
aspirations feelings, and grievances; third, empower them to struggle against and subvert
the unjust and oppressive systems without losing their identity and roles as women. Some
African American feminists may disagree with the ideas and purposes of the Combahee
River Collective Statement, Alice Walker’s ideas of Womanism, or bell hooks and Mae
Henderson’s assertion of the necessity of ‘voice, and ‘black female expression’ for the
transformation of African American women’s position and identity in the society, but all
of them agree on one point, that they must struggle against racism, sexism, and color
discrimination.
Most of the feminists in Pakistan are also striving for these same goals, i.e. selfdetermination, admiration and understanding for all aspects of womanhood, and faith in
7
the idea of the survival of both men and women. They don’t want to supersede their male
counterparts; rather Pakistani women want to play their roles side by side with their male
partners as equals, as dignified, respectable, and liberated persons, not as “the other” in
the sense that Simon de Beauvoir has defined it. Tahira Naqvi, the Urdu short story
writer, novelist and translator, points out in one of her lectures that in the beginning of the
twentieth century novels about women and for women were written by men in which they
“mainly stressed the role of ‘good Muslim women,’ how they should behave, how they
should think and talk”. But, according to Naqvi, with Ismat Chughtai, a famous Urdu
novelist, short story writer, and essayist, things began to change, for she wants to see
women through a woman’s eye and narrate their experiences from a woman’s viewpoint.
According to Naqvi, Ismat Chughtai makes Pakistani women writers realize that “it is
possible for women to write like that. It is possible for women to explore. It is important
for women to write about women.” What Naqvi wants to bring home to her audience, in
my opinion, is what Alice Walker has stated in her definition of “Womanism”: the
admiration and understanding of womanhood and giving a voice to women’s feelings
with feminist expression and in a liberated language.
Brooks’ works also gave such messages to African American women in the
1940s-50s with the intention of transforming them from audience to speakers. Her works
reflect all the features of Black Feminism, although she never claims herself to be a
feminist. The study of Brooks’ works, in the context of the salient characteristics of Black
Feminism, could give a new dimension in the understanding of the need for feminist
ideas, particularly black feminist ideas, among female Pakistani readers as well as
8
ordinary readers of poetry written in English. The main feature of Pakistani feminism
according to Kishwar Naheed, the Pakistani feminist poet is the struggle against gender
oppression, class discrimination, and against the restrictions and inhibitions imposed on
women in the name of religion, morality, and decorum. Moreover, they are also trying to
transform imposed identities and destabilize the social and cultural systems that oppress
and exploit Pakistani women. Broadly speaking, we find a number of similarities between
these characteristics of Pakistani feminism and the salient features of the Black
Feminism, so Pakistani students may not find Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry and her women
characters perfect strangers when they analyze them in the light of the Black Feminism
and in the context of Pakistani feminism. If we could design Brooks’ study carefully and
apply appropriate pedagogy, I think, reading Brooks can teach Pakistani students about
some of the unexplored areas of American life and literature.
As Pakistan was a part of the British Empire till its independence in 1947, it
inherited the education system introduced by its colonial rulers. It continued to follow the
British model, even after it gained its independence, in which English, both language and
literature, was the core subject. The syllabi reflected the teaching of grammar,
composition, and classical British writers at the college level. English was a compulsory
subject and every student had to pass English paper to earn a Bachelor of arts or Science
degree. Moreover the professors, responsible for curriculum and syllabus designing were
mostly graduates from the British universities and they had some bias for British
literature; so they preferred British literature as opposed to American and the literature
written in English from different parts of the world. Hence, it is understandable, why
9
British literature enjoys the central place in the English curriculum of Pakistani
universities. Pakistani students, particularly, at undergraduate and graduate levels, are
quite conversant with spoken and written English. English was taught to the Indians, in
the early days of British rule in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent in order to produce such
local workers who would become cogs in the British administrative machinery. They
established public schools to create a class that would be loyal to and support the British
government in India. As Tariq Rahman, an educator and prolific writer on place and role
of English in Pakistani society and politics, has pointed out,
The great public schools, like the famous Aitchison College in Lahore,
were based upon the aristocratic model of the English public schools.
Their function was to produce a loyal, Anglicized, elitist Indian who
would understand, sympathize with and support the British Raj in India.
This education system that had laid a great emphasis on teaching English language and
literature subjugated the body and mind of the natives as it imposed the British culture
and value system on them. However, at the end of the day, the knowledge of English
language and literature became a source of awareness and empowerment for the natives
and it was one of the major factors of liberation from colonial rule.
Even today, long after independence, the primary aim of teaching English
literature in the secondary level in Pakistani schools remains to teach the students
language rather than to familiarize them with English literary forms or its aesthetic and
literary qualities. The method that has been used to teach English language is “language
through literature.” In this method the stories, poems, and essays written in English by
10
the local, as well as the British and few American writers, have been taught in the old
translation method. In this method, the emphasis is on vocabulary building, using newly
learned words in sentences, grammar taught through the traditional method of
memorizing rules, and developing the ability to translate ideas from Urdu into English,
and those concepts that they have found in books written in English into Urdu.
One of the purposes of teaching English literature is to develop the ability to
communicate in written and spoken forms, which can help in obtaining a job and give
access to sources of power. According to Rahman, English “is the language of the elitist
domains of power not only in Pakistan but also internationally.” An apparent aim of
introducing and teaching English literature during the British rule was to impose British
culture and ideologies, and to assert the superiority of white men. But after the
independence, the motif and purpose have changed— English literature is taught in order
to teach language, which will enable people to acquire advanced knowledge in the field
of natural sciences, as well as social sciences, and it can serve as lingua franca in
international conferences, while cultural and ideological aspects in the works of literature
are played down.
Pakistani students of the secondary and higher secondary schools are well-versed
in the rules of grammar and have a fairly good treasury of English vocabulary, but are
only familiar with the works of William Wordsworth, R. L. Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, and
some other British and American writers, but they may not have any idea of their literary
merits or their real message and ideas. Their efforts and purposes are to learn the
meanings of the words, to acquire writing skills, and to prepare examination questions
11
which test their memory, not their knowledge. In college, they are introduced to
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Hardy, Houghton, and a few American essayists
like Emerson and Twain, short story writers like Hawthorn, O’Henry, and Poe, and poets
like Dickinson and Frost, but again they concentrate on the linguistic and grammatical
aspects of these pieces of literature, rather than on their aesthetic, social, cultural, and
literary features. At this level, also the main emphasis is again on grammar, composition,
and vocabulary building. Students are asked to critically appreciate a poem or a short
story, but they prefer straight questions which have less to do with literary qualities.
Examiners also concentrate on grammar and expression and less on the literariness of the
answers.
In the graduate syllabi of different universities in Pakistan, the main area of study
is British literature, starting from Chaucer to Heaney, from Marlowe to Edward Bond,
from Henry Fielding to Margaret Drabble, and from Bacon to Russell. These universities
allot a small space for American literature in their graduate programs and some short
story writers and poets in undergraduate study. American writers who usually find a place
in the syllabi are Hawthorn, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dickinson, Frost, Wallace Steven,
Arthur Miller, O’Neil, Williams, and Twain. For the last few years, we find names of
some African American writers in the syllabi of some universities, such as Toni
Morrison, Langston Hughes as a short story writer, and Maya Angelou, but African
American literature is largely unfamiliar region for most of our students, as well as many
academics.
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At this level, the students are encouraged to judge and evaluate the merits of a
work of literature with an Arnoldian yardstick. They do not pay much attention to
intercultural or to multi-social relations or “intermingling of life experience and criticalhistorical judgments” (Frank Rosengarten 82). However, the outlook on the study of
literature is changing, for institutions and systems are coming out of their Victorian
vision of education and ideas of literature, and they are helping their students to look at
these works of literature through post-colonial, feminist, cultural critical lenses. It seems
that those at the helm of the affairs of English departments in Pakistani universities have
realized the need to situate literary works within “the always complex and contradictory
nature of historical reality, and of the specific events and trends that mediate the
relationship between a writer and his time” (Rosengarten 72). Now, they seem to have
realized that in order to properly grasp and evaluate a work of literature, the students, as
well as the teachers, need comprehensive knowledge of social, political, philosophical,
and economic currents of the time when it was created and “emotional as well as
intellectual powers to deal adequately with dense, polysemous texts” (Rosengarten 72).
The vision and philosophy may have undergone certain changes, but the motif of
studying English language and literature remains the same.
Sabiha Mansoor in her article, “Culture and Teaching of English as A Second
Language for Pakistani Students,” has pointed out, the role of English in the education
system of Pakistan, that the students and others in Pakistani society consider English
necessary for social mobility. A graduate in English language and literature has been a
13
respectable person in society and has better access to jobs and power. Tariq Rahman
remarks,
English is still the key for a good future – a future with human dignity if
not public deference; a future with material comfort if not prosperity; a
future with that modicum of security, human rights and recognition which
all human beings desire. So, irrespective of what the state provides,
parents are willing to part with scarce cash to buy their children such a
future. (242)
English is still a popular subject among Pakistani students and their parents for economic,
social, and political reasons. Although it is still taught in old Victorian method in most of
the secondary and higher secondary schools in the countryside and small towns, it is
gradually switching over to the American semester system, at least at the college and
university level, and we also find names of American writers more than ever, since the
inclusion of professors who are the graduates from American universities to the faculty.
With this shift, and other changes in social, political, and economic systems caused by
revolution in computer and information technology, new world order, globalization, and
free market economy, American English and American literature, particularly white
American literature, are gaining popularity among the masses, as well as in the
educational institutions. American accent and style in spoken English and American
spelling and style of expression in writing are gaining popularity among Pakistani
younger generation, especially among the student. However, American literature should
be given a respectable place in the syllabi of Pakistani universities, if Pakistani academic
14
institutions want to teach American literature effectively to their students. It can happen
only if the teachers can help the students to understand American literature from a multicultural perspective and in its social, historical, and political background. No doubt, one
can notice an increase in American titles, yet this is not sufficient. American literature
deserves more extensive and intensive exploration, for what we are imparting and
acquainting the students about American literature is only the tip of the iceberg. Pakistani
students need to know more, if they are to become truly familiar with American life and
culture. Although we find a few American writers in various syllabi of different Pakistani
universities, they have yet to include African American writers, particularly woman
writers, as well as other writers from diverse ethnic communities, so that they may have a
more variegated, as well as a more complete picture of social, political, and economic life
and culture of Americans. By studying the social, cultural, and economic life of
minorities, particularly of women, students may come to realize that these groups are
facing kinds of social, psychological, and emotional problems similar to those that
Pakistanis, particularly women are facing. A writer can be better understood, if we can
relate him or her to the readers own problems and issues. Gwendolyn Brooks can be
taught effectively and understood better if the teachers first introduce and explain to their
students the social, psychological, and political background of African Americans,
beginning with slavery, racial discrimination, the violence that followed Emancipation,
racial segregation, the civil rights movement and the rise of Black Nationalism. Should
this happen, the students will have a vivid insight into the issues and ideas which are
prominent in African American literature, particularly Brooks’ works. The teachers, as
15
well as students, may then properly analyze the problems and issues that are raised in
Brooks’ works in that context and then relate them to their own social, cultural, and
political context.
Gwendolyn Brooks, the Chicagoan poet, interests me for her female characters
and her use of traditional Anglo-American poetic forms to subvert and destabilize
conventional and preconceived ideas and images of African Americans, in general and
African American women, in particular. Brooks’ use of classical forms, with some
modifications, can appeal to Pakistani students, teachers, as well as readers of English
poetry. Pakistani students are accustomed to reading classical poetic forms, such as the
sonnet and ballad forms and they can appreciate the aesthetic qualities and literary merits
associated with them. They are familiar with the development of these forms through the
ages—from Wyatt and Surrey to W. B. Yeats—thus they may be able to appreciate the
changes that Brooks has made in them. Brooks’ use of classical forms to subvert and
destabilize conventional concepts of African American women may not be something
entirely foreign to Pakistani readers, for we also find traditional Urdu poetic forms used
for political purposes since the time of British Raj. Women poets of the second half of the
twentieth century have also used classical, as well as modern Urdu poetic forms to
challenge the traditional concepts of Pakistani women and to voice their resistance and
protest against the social, religious, and gender oppression.
Gwendolyn Brooks is an excellent choice of author to teach African American
literature in Pakistani educational institutions, in particular, for her union of morality and
art. An important criterion for the majority of Pakistani teachers of English literature and
16
syllabus designers is that a work of literature must be moral and didactic, as well as
entertaining. They believe in Matthew Arnold’s idea that “a poetry of revolt against
moral ideas, is a poetry of revolt against life, and a poetry of indifference to moral ideas
is a poetry of indifference to life” (qtd. in Lakshmi). In their article, Patricia H. Lattin and
Vernon E. Lattin have pointed out that Brooks also believe in uniting art and morality for
her creative process. In my opinion; a Pakistani audience will not have any problem in
studying Brooks’ poetry despite the differences in culture, social and moral values, and
psychological and emotional issues. I have found Brooks’ poetry conducive to our social
and cultural values.
The choice of Gwendolyn Brooks for my dissertation has come after a careful
analysis and consideration of her work in the context of social, cultural, and moral
requirements of my own society and those of the academic institutions in my country. I
was introduced to Brooks with a beautiful and haunting poem with nursery rhyme
rhythm, “We Real Cool”:
We real cool.
We Left school. We
Lurk late. We Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We Die soon. (Black 331)
The precarious conditions, uncertainties in life of these players, and maternal concerns
and worries of the poem, as well as its unusual form of prosody induced me to read her
collection, The Selected Poems.
17
While browsing through the collection, I became interested in its female
characters, because of their independent minds and their moral and mental courage to
destabilize and challenge unjust and discriminatory systems. Brooks’ women and
mothers’ struggle is to subvert oppressive systems and to transform the denigrated images
of African American women into respectable and dignified ones. Their effort is to evolve
an “alternative system” (Erkkila 200) in which African American women will have
independent identity of their own as ‘makers’ and an existence visible to others. These
characteristics of Brooks’ women made me feel that they could help me to look at the
women and mothers in my society from a new angle and add a new voice to the efforts of
Pakistani feminist writers who are struggling to subvert and destabilize preexisting
identity and ideas. I understand the actions, reactions, and utterances of Brooks’ women,
particularly the mothers, as the resistance, protest, and subversion against oppression,
discrimination, and injustice. They represent their individual struggles and subversion as
well as a broader spectrum of the African American woman’s efforts to destabilize the
preexisting identity and ideas. If we look at Brooks’ women and mothers as the different
facets of a picture, we can understand that Brooks is creating the image and identity of a
new African American woman. From this perspective, I trace their progress from silent or
internalized resistance to verbal articulation of anger and resentment a transition from
lack of articulation to the attainment of voice. This achievement is essential to the
change in their identity and status in the society. The attainment of voice is followed by
the development of their consciousness from personal to communal, as well as its
transference to the majority community by widening its scope. Brooks’ women are
18
conscious of social and political injustice, racial and color discrimination, and their
identity in the society, but it is initially a consciousness limited to an individual or a part
of the community. However, as Brooks’ poetic career progress, the consciousness in her
women also broadens. Ultimately it penetrates into the consciousness of majority
community, and makes them realize their oppression, injustice, and atrocities. Brooks’
women and particularly the mothers extend their anger and awareness of sufferings and
injustice to the oppressor and thus make them their partners in their struggle against the
race oppression and male supremacism.
Pakistani woman readers may appreciate Brooks’ poetry better, as compared to
men, because of the parallel features in their problems and situation. If Pakistani women
are given proper insight into the nature of social, gender, and economic oppression that
the underclass of African American women have to confront, it will help them to
comprehend the importance and necessity of their struggle against and subversion of their
given identity and preexisting systems. In this way, they will be able to look at their
struggle in a multi-social and inter-cultural context. This broader vision can give new
momentum to their protest and resistance against sexist and religious oppression and
class discrimination.
To achieve insight into Brooks’ ideas in her works and the significance of the
transformation of the image and roles of African American women, as well as to attain a
broader vision of feminist struggle, both the teacher and student will have to recognize
the importance of the relation between literature and social, cultural, and political
conditions in which that work of literature is created, and they should be able to
19
understand and link it with their own social, cultural, political problems and issues. In
this way, Pakistani students will be able to appreciate the way Brooks treats cultural
diversity and mediates between predominant values and newly evolved values in her own
society. Pakistani woman writers can also strengthen their struggle to negotiate between
traditional concepts of women who were not allowed to think and express independently
and the new image of free and self-conscious women, who can express and assert their
identity and individuality in bold and liberated language without any inhibition.
The problems that Brooks’ female characters face may not be exactly similar to
those that Pakistani women have to face but if we try to understand and look at them
from broader perspective, we can realize that they are facing almost the same challenges.
The issues that Brooks brings up through her women are basic psychological, emotional,
social and economic problems that ordinary under privileged individuals, including
African American men and women have to face. Their sufferings, oppressions, and
injustices committed against them constitute the themes of her works. Brooks’
sympathies are for the underclass of poor neighborhoods, particularly, for poor old men
and women, poor and starving children, the youth who are the victims of violence
committed by both whites and blacks, and, particularly, poor and oppressed mothers. The
issues and problems that Brooks takes up in her poetry are the basic issues and problems
that are being faced by poor, oppressed, and looked down upon persons in any society
any where in the world. My effort, as an academic, is to introduce Brooks’ works to the
students of my institution and make them aware of the struggle of African American
women to resist and destabilize preexisting systems and overcome oppression and
20
injustice in society. My attempt is to make them realize that despite the differences in
social and cultural systems, there are still common denominators of oppression, injustice,
and gender discrimination.
In Pakistani society, women are treated as inferior beings, as compared to men,
and the oppression of women is a common phenomenon. Pakistani feminist writers are
trying to challenge and subvert the ideas and systems that enable men to impose the
identity that enhances their superiority on women, oppress them and commit violence
against them. In this context, Brooks’ voice of struggle and subversion can invigorate the
efforts of young feminists and students who are trying to challenge the religious
orthodoxy, male chauvinism, and class discrimination, for she represents under classes
and discriminated sections of American society. Her voice is, therefore, more authentic
than that of the white feminists who represent the privileged middle classes.
Brooks, in her works, situates her women in such circumstances and conditions
that the society, as well as its victims, may realize the afflictions and oppressions that
these underclass women are undergoing. Brooks portrays so called “bad women” in such
a way that their humanity is brought out very clearly. They are not given any image
except the image of human beings, with all humanity’s vices and virtues, weaknesses and
strengths. They are neither flawless angelic figures, nor unredeemable sinners; they are
presented as human beings of flesh and blood. They are women with sensitive souls and
womanly passions. Some Urdu writers in Pakistan have created such women who,
according to social and moral criteria, may be condemned as bad women, but they still
retain their humanity and human values. Such women in Brooks’ poetry, and in the
21
writings of Pakistani women writers, can form a common criterion to understand
common issues that they have to face in their day to day existences.
To understand foreign literature, one should be able to create some links between
the literature that one is reading and one’s own social, political, and cultural context. In
his article, “Teaching African-American Literature in Turkey: The Politics of Pedagogy,”
E. Lale Demirturk points out how he tries to create meanings for the Turkish students
while he was teaching African American literature by using different examples from
diverse cultural context and making his students realize how oppressors constructed
meaning of the words according to their own visions and interests. According to
Demirturk, to understand the words in new light and construct a new meaning according
to one’s context, one needs to shift "a location of privilege" (hooks, Teaching
Community 99). With this shift in the “location of privilege” a new understanding and
meaning will dawn on the readers. This new outlook will enable them to relocate the
position of the previously colonized and enslaved classes, as well as African-Americans
and also able to shift the paradigm Myung Ja Kim in her article, “Literature as
Engagement: Teaching African American Literature to Korean Students.” also discusses
cultural, economic, social, and political implications regarding Koreans' perception of
and attitudes toward African Americans, especially after the Los Angeles riots of 1992
while teaching African American literature to Korean students. She also stresses the need
for the ability among the teachers as well as the students to come out of the constructed
meaning imposed by the media and predominant class, concerning African Americans,
and the ability to reconstruct a new meaning and image in their social, political, and
22
cultural context based on new paradigms, reconfigured in the light of new knowledge and
information.
While I am trying to understand Brooks’ poetry, the narrator’s voice, and the
utterances of the characters, I realize that the meaning that I am giving to the utterance
and words, may not be the same as an African American or an American may understand
it. The meaning of the words and language may have changed according to the social,
cultural, and the value systems in which I have been brought up and lived. No doubt, I try
to interpret and understand in the context of American and African American social and
cultural perspective, but original learning and grooming prompt a different perspective
that may vary significantly from that of Brooks’ culture and ideas. It is not only the
matter of social and cultural background, but as an individual, my understanding of an
utterance or even a single word may differ from that of the poet or other readers.
According to Bakhtin,
The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when
the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he
appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.
Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and
impersonal language . . . but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other
people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must
take the word, and make it one's own . . . Language is not a neutral medium that
passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is
populated -- overpopulated with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing
23
it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated
process. (Pam Morris 77)
It is natural that when I read Brooks’ words or utterances, I will assign my own
meanings or interpretations to them to make it my “property” and only then will I
transmit it to my audience. I may mold them according to my comprehension, which is
influenced by my social and cultural perspective, as well as my education. However, my
initial effort is to understand the meanings of the words and utterances in the social,
cultural, literary, and political context in which Brooks utters them. My meanings and
interpretations will be colored by my individuality, my culture, and my value systems.
My audience, in turn, will assign them their own meanings and understand them in their
own context. The process of constructing meaning starts when the readers read Brooks’
words and utterances and when they first try to understand them, keeping in view the
social, cultural, and political perspective in which they are uttered, then their social and
cultural training prompts them to look at them from their own perspective. In this way,
my, as well as their, meanings intersect with authoritative meaning and it creates a new
interpretation and new dimension in the understanding of the text. The new interpretation
and understanding are based on the intersection of two culture and two ideologies. In this
way, we are looking at Brooks works from an angle that American readers may overlook
or may fail to notice.
In this world that has shrunken to a computer screen, the interaction and struggle
among diverse consciousnesses and languages are creating new understandings and new
levels of meanings. Bakhtin remarks, “However, it is in this struggle with another's word
24
that a new word is generated. The dialogic relations of heteroglossia do ensure that
meaning remains in process, unfinalizable” (Morris 74). Gwendolyn Brooks is an African
American poet and has written her poems under specific social, political, and cultural
conditions, but we can not limit the utterances in her works to the meanings that suit one
particular community. Every individual and community can look at them from their own
social and cultural perspective and understand it according to their own consciousnesses.
In this way, Brooks’ works assume a broader scope and a wider audience that multiply
layers of meaning to her words and utterances. In fact, with expanding readership,
Brooks’ works become multi-cultural and multi-national literature. They have
transcended the limits of African American social and cultural environment and can be
looked at and understood from other social and cultural perspective. Bakhtin states
The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular
historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush
rip against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socioideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance, it
cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue.”(Morris 76)
With an adequate introduction of social, political, and psychological perspective,
Pakistani students, particularly, female students will be able to appreciate Brooks’ ideas
and message. Although they are primarily meant for African American women, they can
be related to every woman who is living in an oppressive system and facing sexual
exploitation, and gender discrimination. Pakistani women can identify social, emotional,
psychological problems of African American women and look at them in their social and
25
psychological context, for both the communities are facing problems of identity,
recognition as respectable human beings, gender and class oppressions.
Keeping in view Bakhtin’ ideas and the salient features of the Black Feminism, I
explore Brooks’ early poetry. My stance is, through female characters, particularly
mothers and their utterances, Brooks tries to destabilize the preexisting identity of
African American women and the systems that oppress and make them invisible. In the
second chapter, I study how she uses women, particularly mothers, to transform the role
and image of African American women from denigrated creatures to self-defined and
conscious human beings, who are sensitive to their role as teachers, leaders, and nurturers
of new women with refined ways of thinking and vision. I explore these various changes
in the roles and images of African American women. I also highlight the progress of
Brooks’ ideas as an artist through these various roles that African American women play
under different circumstances and on different occasions. My aim is to highlight the
central place that Brooks gives to her woman and how she changes their position from
objectivity to subjectivity; and from ’make’ to ‘maker.’
In the third chapter, I analyze Brooks’ use of classical poetic forms to voice the
struggle and subversion on the part of poor African American women to destabilize
received identities and preconceived ideas. I discuss Brooks’ choice of the sonnet and
ballad forms and the transformation that she makes in them, in order to serve her purpose
of subverting and destabilizing the prevalent ideas and systems. In this chapter, I analyze
Brooks’ use of parody and the anti-hero to destabilize the traditional identity of African
American women and to subvert the preexisting ideas of African American womanhood.
26
Chapter four studies shift in her narrative technique. “In the Mecca,” her longest poem,
she gives up the cloak of situated language and directly addresses the poem to AfricanAmericans. The narrator and Mrs. Sallie Smith guide us through the Mecca building and
tell, as well as show, us the miseries and poverty of the under-classes of African
American society. They along with Pepita give the vision of liberation and collapse of the
Mecca building, the symbol of confinement and constrictions. The fifth chapter looks at
Brooks’ only novel, Maud Martha in which she gives the vision of new African
American woman, who is trying to establish her identity and carved her place and role in
race, color, and gender biased society. She defies and resists race and color
discrimination with dignity and grace. Despite unfavorable conditions and ugliness in the
society, she optimistically looks at the unpleasant aspects of life. The message of the
novel is “bon voyage.” The novel ends with an optimistic note and a call for sanity. At
the end of the dissertation and in the sixth chapter, I discuss how Brooks’ work is suitable
to teach to Pakistani students in Pakistani colleges and universities.
The poems that I have analyzed in the second chapter mostly deal with the image
and role of African American women and the social, economic, moral, psychological, and
emotional problems that make them invisible and thwart their imaginations and dreams. I
have selected these poems to demonstrate the progress of consciousness in Brooks’
women characters, particularly, the mothers. These poems unravel the different roles that
African American women and mothers play in the society. Their progress indicates the
progress in Brooks’ poetic career and the maturity of her thought. The poems in the third
chapter give insight into the changes that Brooks has brought about in her use of classical
27
poetic forms and her innovations in them. I have selected these poems for they help me to
show how Brooks adopts parodic voice and the figure of the anti-hero to subvert received
identity and concepts. I have selected “In the Mecca” to show that despite the impression
that her poetry after 1967 has lost her earlier aesthetic qualities and has become more
political, she still continues with her earlier themes and aesthetic vision as well as her use
of women and mothers to destabilize and reconfigure a new system based on “essential
sanity black and electric.” My emphasis is that the shift in her poetry occurs at the levels
of narrative style, which has become dispersed, and more complex, and language, which
has become more direct as compared to her early poems. Although it was written in 1953,
I discuss Brooks’ sole novel, Maud Martha in the fifth and last chapter, because of its
genre. I try to show that its themes and the vision that Brooks put forth in this novel are a
continuation of the preceding works and are taken up in later books. It is an essential part
of Brooks’ development as an artist. My effort in this dissertation is to demonstrate that
the mothers and women in Brooks’ works are different facets of a complete image. In
other words, they are different phases of growth and progress of the mother character,
which in turn gives insight into the progress in Brooks’ social and political roles, as well
as her development as an artist.
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CHAPTER II
MOTHER TRANSFORMED: VOICES OF PROTEST AND SUBVERSION
Gwendolyn Brooks transforms the traditional image of the African-American
woman from that of a sexual object and takes them out of their general state of
invisibility in order for them to become independent and self-confident women with
individual voices, She uses them to voice protests against racial, gender, and color
discrimination, to struggle against oppression and injustice, and to subvert the
predominant culture and systems that have rendered them void of both soul and identity.
Her works are peopled by images of suffering and the oppressed black women of
Bronzeville, who represent the down and out of the nation’s black neighborhoods.
Brooks’ sexual as well as racial identity and her experiences in a Chicago ghetto have
enabled her to look at urban experience of black women with a new vision.
Brooks' poetic work may be read as an effort to promote the emergence of black,
female subjectivity and an attempt to articulate and highlight the unarticulated and
unrecognized place and role of the black woman, and particularly the black mother, in the
culture and society that does not recognize her identity and, sometimes, even her
existence. Ann Ducille in her book draws our attention to this attitude of both white men
and women while referring to Sojourner Truth’s famous speech “Ain’t I a woman?”: she
remarks, “Truth’s words were actually a scathing indictment of the racist ideology that
positioned black females outside the category of woman and human while at the same
time exploiting their ‘femaleness’"(36). In most of her early poems, Brooks makes poor
29
black women subjects, for she knows that, as Paulo Freire has put it, "They cannot enter
the struggle as objects in order to later become human beings” (68). The oppressors have
stereotyped the oppressed in such a way that the oppressed have been transformed, either
as non-persons or inanimate or invisible objects. If they want to become human beings
with dynamic identities, not as stereotypes, they will have to struggle as subjects not as
objects. Brooks transforms them into subjects and gives them voices to articulate their
emotions, feelings and problems: Thus she makes them visible human beings with
individual identities. She assigns the central roles to female characters and gives them
what Mae G. Henderson calls “black and female expression” (Cheryl A. Wall 24). With
this voice and expression, her characters forcefully speak against the indignities and
discrimination committed against African-American women in a racist and sexist society.
Her women are transformed women who have attained the awareness of their identity and
voice to articulate their anger and resentment against social and gender injustice. They
are also conscious of their place and role in the changing social and political scenarios.
The introduction of Brooks in syllabi of Pakistani universities, can give new
impetus to Pakistani women students who aspire to change the image and role of women
in Pakistani society. They are trying to challenge the identity imposed by their sexist and
gender oppressive society. The study of Brooks’ women’s efforts to transform their
preexisting identity and values in the frame of the Black feminist theory can be helpful to
Pakistani women who have been expressing the urgency of the need for transforming the
image and role of Pakistani women since the early half of the twentieth century when the
term feminism was not yet in vogue. In those days, according to Naqvi, the concept of
30
“truly liberated women,” or what we later called feminists, was gaining roots among
Pakistani women’s writing through the works of Ismat Chughtai. Through works like
these, Pakistani women have realized the importance of changing one’s identity, as well
as one’s role in society, in order to assert one’s existence and to destabilize the oppressive
measures applied by patriarchy. They believe that what is needed is an agency to voice
their anger, resentment, and protest and that agency is literature written by Pakistani
women themselves.
The Peshawar correspondent of the daily “Dawn” of June 20th, 2008, in his report
on a discussion on the “Portrayal of women in Literature” Organized by the Aurat
(Woman) Foundation, quotes Atiya Hidayatullah, president of the Women Writers'
Forum, who has pointed out in her speech during a discussion: "There is a need to stop
portraying women as a downtrodden section of society in literature. The stereotypical
characterization of oppressed women in literature should be replaced with a more aware
character, fighting for her social rights." We can hear the same kind of arguments and
voices in Gwendolyn Brooks and among the Black Feminists as well. Brooks tries to give
new identities to her women by giving them voice, which enables them to subvert and
destabilize the ideas and values that subordinate them to men. The Black Feminists in the
1970s-80s also stressed the attainment of voice and expression in the pursuit of
transformation from objectivity to subjectivity. Pakistani women writers, like the Black
Feminists, realize that to transform their image and role, they must struggle to attain the
voice of their own.
31
As Naqvi has pointed out, Pakistani women should not rely on men writing about
women, but should themselves be writing about their lives and their feelings. Pakistani
women writers know the significance of the ability to define their image, role, and
feelings by themselves, for if they are described by men, they (men) will impose ideas
and identity that are in conformity with their preconceived ideas and pictures of women.
Pakistani women are aware that the change must come from within, not from old systems
that have defined women as docile and fear-bound creatures. They understand that the
tales of their woes, sufferings, and oppression are not enough to transform their lot. They
should make a stand for their rights in their writings. What they need is to create
understanding among the majority of the members of their society to appreciate their
stance and make them accept their new identity, as well as new roles in the society.
Brooks is also trying to make her society understand the social, psychological, emotional,
and financial problems of African American women and their image and identity.
Brooks’ moral vision, artistic skill, and her ability to negotiate between authoritative
discourse and internally persuasive discourse may enhance the Pakistani women’s
struggle. It will not be difficult for them to assimilate her ideas and tactics to destabilize
the preexisting social and moral systems in their struggle.
A prominent feature of Brooks’ poetry and her novel is the changing role of black
women from addresses to speakers, or from someone who is described by others to
someone who speaks for herself, about herself, and by herself. This change of role from
objectivity to subjectivity or makers from makes allows them to play significant roles, in
32
order to aspire for social and economic mobility, and to figure prominently in the moral,
social, economic, and political life of their community.
Brooks’ treatment of women differs from that of her senior contemporaries, such
as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who also set their writing in an urban environment,
in that she spotlights the experiences of impoverished urban women in her works. In A
Street In Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), and The Bean Eaters (1960), her first
three books of poems, her female characters, mothers, in particular, are the central
characters. While there is no doubt that Wright and Ellison assign certain roles to the
women characters in their works, they are not the main players of the plot, rather they are
background figures or play second fiddle in their urban world. But Brooks, in her works,
concentrates her attention on the effects of the “urban experience” on both AfricanAmerican men and women, highlighting that of the female characters and assigning to
them the most pivotal roles in order to expose the impact of urban experiences on social,
moral, and emotional life of women.
Brooks’ work is marked by powerful and strong female characters that play the
main roles in their families, as well as in their societies. Their most prominent role is that
of warriors in the battle against inequality and injustice in society. They are women with
strong wills who do not submit to the unfavorable odds in their lives and fight against
exploitation and injustice of all kinds. Gwendolyn Brooks’ female characters, especially
mothers, differ from traditional female characters in this respect: Brooks’ characters are
unyielding, rebellious, and non-conformist, while the traditional concept of “good
womanhood”, as described by Ajuan Maria Mance in her book, Inventing Black Women,
33
is that of a woman that is humble, submissive, and that accepting of social norms that
have been laid down by patriarchy. Brooks situates women in notably commanding
positions. In her works, they are no longer invisible or identitiless figures, fallen beings,
and sex symbols, rather, they are morally, emotionally, psychologically strong and
powerful characters who struggle and fight against those values and norms that choke
their imaginations, crush their dreams, and relegate them to back seats.
Brooks’ women expose the unpleasant and undesirable aspects of their society.
Brooks’ women hold up a mirror to society which reflects its follies and foibles, evils and
vices, cruelties and injustices. Their speeches and utterances subvert and destabilize the
predominant systems so that they may reconfigure new ones, which will be conducive to
their aspirations and ambitions. Brooks’ women expose ugly aspects of society, but do
not fret and fume against them; rather, they touch the conscience and consciousness of
the readers by pointing out the tragedies, sufferings, and miseries of poor AfricanAmerican women. In this way, she gets their voices of agony, anguish, and resentment
heard and their abject lives visible. Brooks uses her characters to uncover the vices and
weaknesses in her society and satirizes them without resorting to cynicism and violence.
Her characters do not tell us that there are evil and vices, such as, injustice, oppression,
corruption, or racism; rather, they point out the tragic conditions in which they exist and
its relationship to individuals in hopes, that we may learn a moral insight from the
juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, death in life, and romance and reality. Brooks, in
her works, transforms not only the roles of African American women from objects to
subjects and from addressees to speakers, but also their stereotyped images—from
34
denigrated portraits to dignified ones, and from sex objects to strong and powerful
women with social, moral, and political visions. It is something unusual for African
American literature of the first half of the twentieth century to depict African American
woman as self-defined and self-respecting figures, because the male writers of this
period, as Emily J. Orlando has pointed out in her essay “Feminine Calibans” and “Dark
Madonnas of the Grave” portrayed women as “objects d’ art and beautiful corpses—
sometimes both at once – reducing them to objects of their Gaze,” and also as “feminine
Caliban” (Tarver and Barnes 65). They also present women as small in physical and
mental stature in order to give the impression of them being disempowered beings.
Another image assigned to black women in those days was that of a depraved and
licentious woman who yields to her every sexual desire. Gwendolyn Brooks in her works
tries to mitigate the damage done to African-American women by such images which
promote them as inanimate objects, vile semi-human beings, and creatures of
unrestrained and uncontrolled sexual desires. She tries to transform their image by
rendering her female characters dignity, respectability, and power. She presents them as
mentally and morally strong figures. Some of her women are prostitutes, like Mame in
“Queen of the Blue,” but they have self-respect and rebellious natures that save them
from being viewed as completely fallen beings; or powerful and determined women like
Mrs. Booker T, a poor mother, who can overcome a mother’s love for her son and breaks
her maternal bond when he violates her moral values.
Brooks’ works reveal diverse roles and images of African American women.
Their primary role is that of the makers, who are struggling to reconfigure a social,
35
political, and moral system in which their social and economic mobility is possible. We
observe Brooks’ gradual “unmasking” of the progression in the mother’s social and
political roles, as well as the transformation of the image of women in her poetry. Most of
Brooks’ early poems are studies of the complex psychological and emotional problems of
black women, particularly that of mothers. She probes into their psychology as they try to
adjust their lives according to the gloomy and unfavorable conditions of the kitchenette
building, where their “dreams” of social and economic mobility are frustrated by “onion
fumes" and "yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall” (Black 20). In the wider social and
political life of racist America, their hopes and aspirations are smothered by the traumas
of the lynching of their lovers and sons and the hostility of race and color prejudice—so
much so that their faith in America is weakened by the racial discrimination they face
even when they defend America in Patriotic Military service. In the sonnet, “the white
troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men” in the sonnet sequence, ”Gay
Chaps At the Bars,” brooks is careful to note that the different boxes are assigned for
dead bodies of black and white soldiers: "a box for dark men and a box for Other” (Black
70).
Brooks uses African American women and mothers to expose the multifarious
problems being faced by urban slum dwellers and through their utterances she points out
sources and causes of their abject poverty and deplorable social conditions. In this way,
she creates consciousness in the society of prevailing inequalities and injustices, in hopes
that this awareness could help to rectify the follies and vices of society. On the other
hand, it might also create desire for economic mobility among African American men
36
and women that will enhance their social and class mobility. In most of her poems, her
canvas is limited to a small kitchenette apartment or a room in a club or a bar, but her
themes and the subject matters are universal, as they deal with basic human problems.
“Kitchenette Building,” which Brooks described as typical of the bulk of her work, deals
with the basic problem being faced by poor and deprived persons—the frustration of their
dreams of amelioration of social and economic conditions and class mobility. The poem
narrates the socio-economic, psychological, and emotional problems of the inhabitants of
the sordid, squalid, and enclosed structure which resembles a trap, and who are
preoccupied with day-to-day survival and have to give up their dreams or “imagination”
and attend to urgent practical needs. Brooks employs a housewife, probably a mother, to
voice the unfulfilled aspirations, unaccomplished ambitions, unrealized imaginations, and
“dream deferred” (Langston Hughes 426).
The narrator's voice is a collective voice, instead of the first person singular, ‘I’,
she uses the plural ‘we’: “WE ARE things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, /
Grayed in, and gray,” (Black 20). The men and women living in this entrapped place are
not human beings, they are inanimate objects, and “things of dry hours” (Black), and in
such a dreary and oppressive atmosphere dreams have a very slim chance of survival. For
those who are struggling for day to day survival, their hopes and imaginations are choked
by financial stringencies: "‘Dream’ makes a giddy sound, not a strong one like ‘rent,’
‘feeding a wife,’ and ‘satisfying a man’” (Black). According to the narrator, even if the
inhabitants of the kitchenette building could keep their dreams clean, warm, and alive, the
other practical problems and necessities of life will not allow the characters to cherish
37
them. The final lines describe how their dreams vanish into the thin air: “. . . . let it begin?
We wonder. But not well! not for a minute! Since Number Five is out of the bathroom
now, We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it” (Black). The overtone of this line is
both comic and pathetic. For an insensitive reader, the action may be seen as comic, for,
the apparent, incongruity between the serious matters that are discussed in the preceding
lines and the frivolity of the action being described in this line. Brooks uses Bathos, the
sudden change from a serious subject or feeling to something that is silly, or not
important or banal to create comic moments in her poetry. But for a reader who can feel
the deprivations and poverty of ghetto dwellers dream of “lukewarm water,” this symbol
of physical comfort and improved economic conditions, is thwarted by capitalistic and
racist systems. Moreover, as Hansell has described, it gives a more definite sense of what
was implied in the opening line. In this poem, the narrator is a commentator who is
drawing the readers’ attention to the need for an alternative system that may help poor
African Americans to fulfill their dreams. At the same time she is exposing social
problems, economic hardship, and emotional frustrations that are destroying the
yearnings of the poor inhabitants of the kitchenette building.
Brooks’ women are neither heroic nor god-like in attributes or stature; they are
average human beings with typical human weaknesses, who are fighting against their fate
bravely, yet with resignation. She portrays her characters lovingly, realistically, and
objectively. She does not condemn any character for his/her follies, foibles, or vices, nor
extol any character for his/her race, color, sex, or morality. Rather, she treats both good
and bad characters equally regardless of their vices or virtues, social or economic
38
condition, and race. She loves every one of her characters for only one quality, that he
/she is a human being. Norris B. Clark in her article “Gwendolyn Brooks and a Black
Aesthetic,” remarks,
Brooks' poetry remains one of love and affirmation, one that accepts some
hate and perhaps some violence as necessary without condemning or those
who have been pawns to interracial and intraracial forces. Adequately
reflecting the hopes and aspirations of the black community, Brooks
displays a love for her brothers and sisters regardless of psychosocial or
socioeconomic position. (Mootry and Smith 92)
She does not condemn Mrs. Coley’s fat daughter for cuckolding of her husband in “The
Vacant Lot,” she does not look down upon the poor old couple for their poverty in “The
Bean Eaters,” nor does she unleash her wrath against the mother who has an abortion in
the poem “Mother.” Rather she presents them without judgment. Her characters enable
the reader to understand the plights, deprivations and social constrictions of the down and
out of the society, “who are poor, / who are adjudged the leastwise in the land" (Black
116). They also help the reader realize the atrocities, discriminations, and injustices
committed against them by society and the laws of the realm. “Negro Hero” and the
sonnet series, “Gay Chaps at the Bar” expose many serious issues concerning race and
color relation in the United States armed forces and help the reader to understand the
policy of segregation and discrimination made by the laws of government agencies. In the
“Ballad of Pearl May Lee,” we find the racist majority community lynching a person
because of his race and color, while the law stands silently as an onlooker.
39
Her characters are not revolutionaries or rebels in the common sense, but their
voices/utterance are no less subversive than rebels or political dissidents. In this regard,
the voices/utterances of the mother characters are consistent in their calls for change or
destabilization of the existing social, political, and economic systems, as well as moral
and cultural values that thwart and frustrate their dreams. The sonnet, "First fight. Then
fiddle. Ply the slipping string," in the section entitled “Womanhood” in Annie Allen, has
been popular and according to Melhem, “had especial currency during the Civil Rights
Movement” (72). Annie, the mother, who has experienced many changes in her life,
finally realized that one has to create an atmosphere that will be conducive to one’s
artistic talent and creative potential. Annie believes that “politics must precede art”
(Melhem 72). She commands her children, "First fight. Then fiddle.” In this imperative
mood, there is no subject and if we read out of context, this command has wider
implications for it is not directed to any specific person or race or color or gender.
Annie has seen the outcome of World War II with regard to African-Americans.
They have won the war in Europe and Pacific, but nothing much has changed at home.
They still suffer from Jim Crow laws, as well as racial and cultural oppression. Annie
understands that to change the system and to create a favorable environment for African
Americans, they need to struggle, fight at every level, and subvert preexisting systems.
So she urges,
But first to arms, to armor.
Carry hate In front of you and harmony behind.
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
40
Win war.
Rise bloody,
maybe not too late for having first to civilize a space
Wherein to play your violin with grace. (Black 118)
She knows that African Americans have to fight another war at home: the war
against discrimination and for their rights. They have to fight for justice, self-defense, and
self-dignity. They know that they have to fight this war to attain their rights and also to
protect themselves from oppression and cruelty of the majority community: “But first to
arms, to armor./ Carry hate In front of you and harmony behind.” They know that they
must win it if they want to live with grace, dignity, and safety.
This battle cry for the war of freedom from poverty, injustice, discrimination, and
oppression comes not from a strong male hero figure, but from a poor mother. Brooks
has altered the identity of African American women, especially that of the mothers from
‘makes’ to ‘makers’ and ‘audience’ to ‘speakers.’ They are, in fact, making a new space
within an old environment that will be conducive to the living of life in a creative
fashion. With this transformation of woman’s identity and role, Brooks destabilizes the
preexisting identity of African American women. Brooks establishes her mother
characters as sources of inspiration and guidance for not only African Americans, but
also poor and suffering people of the world. Annie is call for “hate / In front of you and
harmony behind,” and to use it as “armor and arms” may not be appreciated by some
readers on the pretext that it incites hatred and violence. However, one should read
carefully note that the hatred that she is advocating is to be used as a weapon of assault
41
against inequalities and injustice and as a defensive device to protect oneself from
oppression and injustice. Her emphasis is to civilize a “space,” not people. This means
that she wants to make not people. the place more favorable for her people and their
potentials. One notes that she remarks that it is “maybe not too late for having first to
civilize a space,” so that they may exercise their talents with “grace.” The juxtaposing of
“arms” and ”armor” and “hatred” and “harmony” gives insight into the functioning of
Annie/Brooks’ mind, who is following the doctrine of defense being the best offense and
hate being a means of subverting the system which discriminates among human beings.
Moreover, the subject-less verbs make the reader feel that this poem, if read out of
context, is meant for humanity at large, particularly, to those who are suffering from
oppression and injustice. Annie, the mother, is teaching her children, representatives of
the children of oppressed countries, to resist and struggle against inequality and
exploitation to create a milieu in which they and their art can thrive and grow. The image
of the mother in this sonnet can, in no way, be called that of a weak and submissive
woman who will accept the received ideas and images of black women silently and
resignedly. She is a changed woman with ‘voice,’ urging a new generation of African
Americans to struggle for an alternative system. One can see easily that she anticipates
the militant women of the 1960s.
The speeches and utterances of Brooks’ women, especially, those of mothers,
reflect the mood and temperament of the community as well as the poet herself. Brooks
and her characters, in her early poems, speak in the same language body, i.e. in situated
language. Brooks and her narrators as well as her characters address the audience in a
42
mask language to conform to the requirements of mainstream readers, the white
publishers, social norms and political correctness, as well as the literary criteria of the
time. The readers understand them according to their own social, cultural, psychological,
and political perspective or orientation. Brooks’ women and mothers are given voice to
express their feelings, transform their identity and to reconfigure a value system.
Brooks’ women and their utterances directly, as well as indirectly, expose the
social and political mood of the African-Americans in the period between the World War
II and the Black Arts Movement. The women and mothers in Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry
and her sole novel reveal the social, economic, and political culture and aspirations of the
underclass of the African American communities living in the slums of America’s larger
cities. The people in her works are not only characters or personaswho interact between
themselves, but are also voices and utterances that destabilize accepted social and moral
norms to reconfigure a new milieu, in which they will be recognized as distinct from
previously imposed images. Their interactions, monologues, and dialogues give a sense
of continuity to the themes in her works.
One of the social problems that African American women with dark complexions
have to face is color discrimination within African American society. Brooks’ women
challenge the criteria of beauty defined by white culture by reconfiguring a place for
black women in society. This has been a recurrent theme in her early poems and it
continues in her 1960 collection, The Bean eaters For example, in the poem, “Jessie
Mitchell’s Mother,” the direct interaction between mother and daughter brings up what
Arthur P. Davis calls “black-and-tan theme”—the rejection of black color girls by tan
43
men and it psychological, social, and emotional implications on them. But this theme
takes a strange and more complex psychological turn in “Jessie Mitchell’s Mother.” It
describes the unusual hatred between a mother and a daughter because of the difference
in their complexion and makes the readers aware of the abysmal depths to which color
discrimination can lead human soul. This poem can also be read as the juxtaposition of
love for and pride in one’s race and color, self- dignity, strength and rejection of “the old,
white-inspired values”(Melhem 120), represented by the daughter, and the psychological
complexity of an African American mother suffering from “black self-hate” (Melhem
120). The phenomenon of “black self-hate,” represented by the mother is the out come of
the white standards of beauty. However, the message that the values represented by the
daughter, the new generation, will survive and the preferences of the mother, the dying
generation, will diminish sounds like an anticipation of the Black Arts Movement’s
slogan of black is beautiful.
When we look at the subtleties and symbols that Brooks employs in this poem
from all possible angles and different level of meanings, or with a heteroglossic
approach--not only from conventional and accepted standards of interpretation, we can
clearly see the direct message or meaning and indirect or refracted meaning in it. "Jessie
Mitchell's Mother," apparently, tells of the antagonism between a dark complexioned
daughter and a light complexioned mother, yet a close reading of the poem paying special
attention to the social, cultural, and psychological context reveals that it is a criticism on
the baneful influence and destructiveness of intraracial prejudice, highlighted here in the
conflicts between the young and old generation and the contest between dark and light
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color. Jessie dislikes and hates her aging and crumbling mother whom she considers
foolish and spineless. She is so indifferent to her that she says she would not weep on her
death. “My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly: Sweet, quiver-soft,
irrelevant. Not essential. Only a habit would cry if she should die” (Black 344).
On the other hand, the mother envies her daughter for her youth and also because
of the consciousness of her premature senility and dilapidation caused by marriage to a
poor man. This feeling of envy for her daughter’s youth and vitality makes her already
failing physical and mental conditions worse. But she has one comforting factor, that is
her yellow color and she is proud of it. She knows that Jessie is black-skinned and will
suffer more. The thought that her daughter will suffer more than she seems to give some
pleasure and solace to her, however, the fact that she thinks this indicates her sick mind
and spiritual emptiness. To save herself from despair, she takes refuge in her vanity of
being yellow and beautiful:
Crept into an old sly refuge: Jessie's black
And her way will be black, and jerkier even than mine. Mine,
in fact, because I was lovely, had flowers
Tucked in the jerks, flowers were here and there. (Black 344)
The mother, who upholds the values imposed by white culture, is depicted as a weakwilled and spiritually hollow person, who is at the mercy of her daughter. Jessie’s
mother’s thought, as well as soul, s influenced by white values of beauty. She looks down
upon her daughter’s dark complexion and expects that Jessie will suffer more than she
does because of her complexion. However, the interaction between Jessie and her mother
45
reveals Jessie’s pride in her race and color and it reflects the rising sense of selfconfidence and self-affirmation among the new generation of African Americans. Jessie
is a forerunner of future generation of African American women who we come across in
the 1970s and 80s: proud and confident.
Brooks’ mothers have voice and consciousness. They find diverse ways to
articulate their anger, feelings, and aspirations. Their utterances are used as an agency to
resist and subvert the values and systems that denigrate African-American women and
also to reconfigure an alternative system. The utterances/speeches of Brooks’ mothers are
either direct or indirect addresses to the social, political, economic, or psychological
problems being faced by ghetto dwellers, in general, and black women, in particular.
Whether a mother is a speaker or an addressee, she is the source of insight into the
problems and sufferings of African-Americans. We find a variety of voices among the
women in her works—ranging from the cry of anguish of a poor mother who has to abort
her children because of poverty, the threat of murder by society in “The Mother,” to the
outburst of self realization in “Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi: Meanwhile the
Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” to the silent, but powerful expression of struggle,
perseverance, and protest in “The Last Quatrain of Emmett Till.” With voices that range
from suggestive to overt to “oracular” (Melhem 2) the female characters and personae of
the poems reflect the diversity and complexity of black women, their identities and the
problems they face. The diverse nature of Brooks' female characters enables her to
expose many problems—poverty, oppression, social, economic, injustices, and racial,
gender, and color discrimination of the urban black women, and African-Americans, in
46
general. George Kent states in his biography of Brooks that “she felt that the turn of the
times was toward relief for all ‘uncomfortable’—and that category included blacks” (64).
Brooks uses her mother characters and their utterances to uplift the image of African
American women and to lay bare their social and economic problems that they may come
to the notice of other members of society and be brought closer to solution. Their
language is aimed toward the articulation and assertion of awareness of their place and
role in a racist and sexist society, yet Brooks never puts abusive language into their
mouths. Rather she expresses her anger, resentment, and resistance against the injustices
and discriminations in forms and dictions that reflect moral and ethical values that are
humanistic in qualities. Brooks’ use of language, elevated or vernacular, reflects her idea
of defiance and resistance with grace and without using violent action or invectives. Her
characters rarely use an expression or discourse that goes against her moral sense or her
aesthetic values. In the sonnet series, “Gay Chaps at the Bar” we can feel the intense
anger of the soldiers against discrimination, but they never resort to vituperation. They
show their anger in language which would not offend others: “If Thou be more than hate
or atmosphere Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves. Or we assume sovereignty
ourselves” (Black 72). The anger and protest is expressed in the form of prayer to God,
but we can feel its intensity, as well as the violence and usurpation that could erupt if
grievances are not removed. While in “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi:
Meanwhile the Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” the anger and resentment of both
mothers is compared to the fragrance of "magnolias," and its smell is so strong that it
permeates both southern and northern parts of the United States. However, this powerful
47
feeling is expressed not by violent language or threat to “assume sovereignty ourselves,”
but through color, taste, smell, and sensation. The anger of male soldiers is expressed in
the language of a usurper, whereas the anger of mothers is conveyed through the
language of a ‘maker.’ Brooks expresses her anger and protest against the oppression and
discrimination against African Americans in her early poetry through both her man and
woman characters. The anger and protest express through male characters have the
elements of violence, destruction, and revolt whereas the anger and protest lodge through
women, particularly through the mothers are done in creative manner and positive
fashion. The women and mothers defy and resist oppression, injustice, and discrimination
with dignity and grace without losing poise and balance. It seems that brooks is
demonstrating with the help of her woman and mother characters to the oppressed and
downtrodden African and Americans how to give vent to their anger and lodge their
protest in non-violent and positive manner: it is the message that we find in most of her
early works.
Although Brooks’ mothers belong to the same social, moral, and cultural
environment and share the same heritage, they have their own specific identities and
voices, which reflect the social, political, moral, or economic problems they, as
individuals, are facing. However, when these diverse voices merge, they become a single
powerful voice that can bring about change in the traditional concept of the black mother
and the black woman. Thus their voice signifies struggle and subversion against the
predominant systems that would trample their hopes and aspirations by reconfiguring
new identities.
48
The women in Brooks’ works are aware of the interracial oppression and injustices in
society, but they usually do not give voice to their anger, resentment, and resistance. However,
when they become mothers and their children’s happiness or future is at stake, they gain voice
and express their rage effectively and powerfully. Annie, in Annie Allan, feels and shows her
resistance against social constrictions, interracial oppression, and poverty, but she gives voice
to her feelings only when her children face starvation, discrimination, and deprivations.
According to Patricia Hill Collins, motherhood has provided "a base for self-actualization,
status in the Black community, and a catalyst for social activism" (118). In “Annie
Allen,” Annie registers the change when she moves from submission to protest, from
passive acceptance to loud and powerful command and from romance to reality. The
change comes to her when she becomes a mother.
In the sonnet series “The Children of the Poor,” we can observe different facets of
Annie’s role as a mother. She addresses issues of poverty and the politics of protest and
resistance and speaks directly to society and to her children in sonnets 2 and 4. In the
sonnet 2, “what shall I give my children?” she poses a perennial question that ghetto
dwellers and the underclass of society have to face in every age—how do they feed and
clothe their children? She asks this question to her society in a challenging tone to shake
it out of its indifference to the sufferings of black children. In this sonnet, Brooks uses the
voice of a poor mother to expose the hunger and poverty that is rampant in single parent
poor families, as well as the discrimination that poor African American children have to
face in day-to-day life. This mother seems to be mocking the American dream and the
promises that are made in the anthem.
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The poem opens with an abrupt dramatic question: “What shall I give my
children?” She then goes on to describe their social, psychological, and emotional
problems, as well as the poverty and hunger that they are facing:
Who are poor,
Who are adjudged the least wise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure. (Black 116)
The images of “lepers” and “Stones,” as Gladys Margaret Williams has pointed
out, have Biblical associations and the poet’s use of Biblical images gives the message of
the poem a sense of timelessness. The allusion to lepers establishes the link among the
suffering and deprived of humanity. It also gives the impression that the problem of
sickness, hunger and poverty has existed since time immemorial. The description “quasi,
contraband” creates the image of children as outcasts, and it also reminds us of the
impoverished and miserable conditions of the escaped slaves before the Civil War. “No
velvet and no velvety velour” tells the reader of the deprivations these children have to
face in their lives. By using the images of “lepers,” “contraband”, and “velvet and velvety
velor,” Brooks wants the reader to visualize the children as lepers who are kept away
from society and compelled to stay out of town and subsist on food and money that they
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get from charity or begging. The children are also related to impoverished and starved
slaves who escaped to Union territory during the Civil War. With the help of these
images of sickness, poverty, deprivation and the disturbing questions of a mother, the
poet is trying to prick the conscience of both black and white societies that are
responsible for their plight, and to arouse the consciousness of the African American
community. The mother in this poem throws doubt on American democracy and hints at
the failure of the American dream.
The connotation of the image of the stone varies because at first Brooks creates
the impression that “the children are discarded stone thought to be worthless since it has
been shaped by an unskilled craftsman” (Williams) or a craftsman who is not given
proper tools to trim and shape them for specific purposes. But later in the sestet, the poet
changes the connotation of “stone” to seed:
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, and device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.
The children who have been compared with “lepers” and rejected stones, are now
describes as “stone,” seed that could not be planted properly because the mother lacks the
necessary devices, conducive environment, and fertile soil. The images of undernourished, half-developed forms and the sense of restricted choice also continue in the
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sestet. Brooks, in fact, through the mother and undernourished children, raises the voice
of protest against poverty and hunger that is distorting and destroying, not only the
physical appearance of the younger generation, but also their mental and psychic make
up. The seeds of the future are frozen and destroyed by “an autumn freezing
everywhere.” The “autumn freezing” is a cold and hostile milieu created by the dominant
culture, and Brooks’ mothers, in conformity to their image as ‘the makers,’ the trimmers
of stones and growers, are trying to change the environment in which the seed of the
future of African American society cannot grow and thrive. Their effort is to instill a
consciousness that their fate can only be transformed if they have the will to create a
favorable environment and resources for themselves, and for that they need an alternative
system. The mother, the ‘maker,’ can trim and mold the required shape and grow the
required talents that are needed for alternative system, if they have the necessary
resources.
Brooks is a dauntless commentator and critic of social and political injustice and
oppression in her society. Her women do not confine themselves to kitchen and
kitchenette building, their vision is broad and it encompasses national and international
social and political situations. In “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi:
Meanwhile the Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon," the mother is raising an issue that has
national and international importance—apartheid, racial violence, and American
democracy. “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi” questions the fairness of the
American judicial system and exposes the heinousness of racial and gender
discrimination which allows a particular race and gender to oppress another. This poem is
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written in response to the murder of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who was beaten and
killed after being accused of making a pass at a white woman in 1955, during his visit to
Mississippi.
Gwendolyn Brooks presents the situation from the point of view of Mother and
imagines how both black and white mothers would feel in such a situation. The young
white mother, "maid mild" is assigned the larger role of general motherhood. She, “maid
mild” reviews the crime that is committed in her name in two contexts of the ballad
tradition in which a beautiful maiden is saved from a villain, a symbol of evil, by a
handsome knight, and from the perspective of a mother. In both the cases she is not
satisfied with her role, because she feels that she is playing the role not of her choice, but
the role that has been allotted to her by the white patriarchy. The realization of her
husband’s crime arouses in her intense anger and hatred for him. The awareness of the
intensity and heinousness of the crime and her role in it fills her with agony, suffocation,
and a sense of confinement: “Then a sickness heaved within her. / The courtroom CocaCola, The courtroom beer and hate and sweat and drone, /rushed like a wall against her
(Black 339).
The central action of the poem is the creation of a relationship between the
motherly feelings of the Bronzeville mother and the Mississippi mother. This bond
enables the white mother and the black mother to form a united anger and hatred against
the murderous white man—the husband of the “maid mild”—who is their common
oppressor. The anger and hatred first surface in the white mother's realization of her role
as “maid mild” and the fact that she has no control over her body, as it is the possession
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of her husband. Her sense of identity and the common bond of infliction and suffering
with the black mother, as a fellow woman, intensify the hatred and it becomes "Bigger
than all magnolias,” whose fragrance spreads through the barriers of race and color. The
shared feeling of hatred and anger between the black and white mothers breaks the wall
of separation between black and white races and north and south. Brooks’ "glorious
flower" of hatred, according to Betsy Erkkila, “suggests the revolutionary power of
female anger and female bonding as a source of potentially transforming social energies”
(208). Brooks' idea of the understanding and relation between an African-American
mother and a white mother as a source of power that can bring about a revolution in the
oppressive white male dominated system was a radical idea in the late 1950s, when racial
discrimination had been shattering the possibility of cross-racial sisterhood
The scene of the poem opens on the wife's meditation on the murder of Emmett
Till. She wonders whether the killing of “the dark villain” who “was a blackish child of
fourteen,” was justifiable. When her husband slaps her younger boy for misbehaving at
the breakfast table, she understands her husband’s nature. He is prone to violence and
cruelty. She feels herself helpless for she cannot protect her child and is disgusted with
her husband for his crime and for his chauvinism. Her anger and hatred intensifies with
the realization of her husband’s true nature and his, senseless killing of Till, as well as
with the understanding of her own helplessness. Melhem observes that Brooks makes the
perfume of that blossoming hate and anger so intense and strong that it overflows the
limits of this poem and permeates the next one—the unforgettable and fascinating sequel,
entitled "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmet Till," which describes the Bronzeville
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Mother, who has been, until then, silent and, except for a passing reference toward the
end of the first poem, absent. Her absence is “a brilliant example of the invisibility whites
can confer on blacks” (Gertrude Hughes 383). Brooks’ subtle fusion of the white
mother’s feelings of hatred for husband and frustration for ineffectual role and the black
mother’s feelings of agony and resentment against white male oppression and atrocity,
suggests that both white and black women are the victims of injustice, male chauvinism,
gender oppression, and discrimination. Here, brooks may be alluding to the possibility of
joint struggle against the common enemy of woman, male supremacism and white culture
that renders woman non-person or invisible entity.
Brooks separates these two poems in the collection, but they are placed one after
another, so that the reader may link them while reading. These two poems have a smooth
and coherent transition. Reading the last part of “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in
Mississippi: Meanwhile A Mississippi Mother burns Bacon” and “The Last Quatrain of
the Ballad of Emmet Till” together brings up the idea of common human bond that joins
the consciousness of the two mothers for the white mother’s hatred of gender oppression
and male supremacism becomes part of the black mother’s sorrow for her son who was
killed as the result of racial oppression and discrimination. Thus reading the two poems
together confer upon them new vision and dimension of protest and resistance against
gender oppression and racial discrimination as well as other injustices in the society. The
merger also broaden the context of Brooks’ struggle and subversion for she is not only
speaking anger and protest against the unjust killing of a black boy by the white racist
systems but also voicing a white mother’s resistance and resentment against the
55
stereotyping of women by the ideas and values evolved by sexist patriarchal society.
When we join the last part of “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters….”and the complete poem
of “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” including the title, and carefully
read them together as one poem, they show how intense hatred engulfs them and merges
them into one frame of resentment for gender oppression and racial supremacy that in
turn lead to atrocity:
She did not scream.
She stood there.
But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower,
And its perfume enclasped them-big
Bigger than all magnolias.
The last bleak news of the ballad.
The rest of the rugged music. (A Bronzeville Mother loiters. . . .)
The last quatrain.
THE LAST QUATRAIN OF THE BALLAD OF
EMMET TILL
after the murder,
after the burial
Emmet's mother is a pretty-faced thing;
the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room
drinking black coffee.
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She kisses her killed boy.
And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
through a red prairie. (Black 339-40)
The expression, “But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower,” brings out the intensity
of the wife’s repulsion of her husband and destabilizes and subverts the male hegemony
over female body and white supremacy. The silence and wordlessness of the grief
stricken mother who was stunned by the tragic death of her son is another way of
subverting and resisting the predominant systems. The images, “red room,” “black
coffee,” “Chaos in windy gray” and “red prairie” evoke a sense of chaos and confusion,
as well as gloominess. The “red” reminds one of the blood of Till and redness of the
younger boy’s face after his father has slapped him, as well as the blood that the white
mother feels over her. “Red” conveys a sense of foreboding; it reminds the reader of the
bloody killings of the past and hints at the possible bloodshed in future.
This poem is an “alter ego relationship” between two mothers and a "drama of
consciousness" (Mootry and Smith 184). Brooks very subtly transfers the consciousness
of a black mother to a white mother, succeeding in penetrating the mind and thinking of
the white Mississippi mother; and through her consciousness she subverts the
predominant social, political, and cultural systems. In fact, Brooks' development from her
early years to her final work might be read as “a progressive unmasking and expansion of
the voice and figure of the mother, as Brooks articulates a larger and larger role, both for
the mother in the black community and for herself, as a kind of cultural mother to the
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political project of black literary and social creation” (Erkkila 197). Throughout her
career, Brooks uses the mother or her utterances to undermine the social and moral
conventions that restrict the role and place of women in general and black women in
particular. As her poetic career progresses, we find progress in the role of mothers in her
works. The powerful mothers in “A Street in Bronzeville” (1945) are conscious of social
and gender discrimination, as well as social constrictions and stringent economic
conditions, but they seldom voice their anger or resentment. In “Annie Allen,” we hear
Annie’s loud and powerful voice of protest and call for struggle and resistance; and in
“The Bean Eaters” the consciousness of black mother penetrates into that of white mother
and becomes a powerful source of change in the oppressive system.
Mothers, in Brooks’ poetry, play different roles. They assume the roles that are
traditionally assigned to man, in American society in the early part of the 20th century,
such as that of the breadwinner of the family, protector of her home and children, and
even head of the family. They are authoritative figures who dictate the social and moral laws
and teach the principles of life and worldly wisdom. She draws her authority from a power base
within the family, of which she is the head, because in the milieu of Brooks’ mother poems there is
no ‘patriarch.’ Even if there is a father or a male figure, she is equal to him, if not more powerful.
In Brooks’ ‘mother’ poems, mothers are strong, dignified women who can articulate their feelings
and points of views, as well as assert their authority. For example, in "Big Bessie throws her son
into the street,” "When Mrs. Martin's Booker T,” and "Mrs. Small” the usual masculine
duties are performed by the mother. Mrs. Small in "Mrs. Small" exerts a kind of subtle
revenge for her four missing sons by spilling a few drops of steaming hot coffee on the white shirt of
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a white insurance agent, a symbol of white culture. Mrs. Small is a gracious little lady who
offers to an insurance agent a steaming hot coffee pot in confusion:
'Oh!' Mrs. Small came to her senses,
Peered earnestly through thick lenses,
Jumped terribly. This, too, was a mistake,
Unforgivable no matter how much she had to bake.
For there can be no
whiter whiteness than this one:
An insurance man's shirt on its morning
run. This Mrs. Small now soiled
With a pair of brown
Spurts (just recently boiled)
Of the 'very best coffee in town.'” (Black 341-42)
"Mrs. Small" reveals the problems and sensibility of a housewife, who is caught up in the
daily grind of domestic chores, as well as other social and financial problems. Mrs.
Small is a victim of the economic problems of white culture, signified by the insurance
installments and insurance salesman, symbols of American capitalism. She has to attend
to the demands and responsibilities of her family. Mrs. Small is angry with the whites,
who she holds responsible for the death of her four sons, “four (horrors) could not be
heard any more” (Black 341), and she expresses her hidden rage by spilling some drops
of hot coffee on the man's shirt. This apparently accidental action can be looked at as a subtle
action of revenge by a mother for the death of her sons. Although this action indicates the very weak
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resistance of the mother and demonstrates imperceptible power, there is yet resistance and power in
this small gracious “tan” mother’s action.
Mrs. Small’s way of taking revenge and showing her authority is more subtle than the blunt
and direct action taken by Mrs. Martin in reaction to her son's socially unacceptable action. Mrs.
Booker T openly censures her son for the immoral act and shifts to another side of town as a
protest when he declines to marry his pregnant girlfriend. The dramatic ballad, "When Mrs.
Martin’s Booker T," tells the story of a mother who desires to a present respectable and
dignified picture of Bronzeville and its dwellers—In other words, the African American
community in general. Mrs. Martin feels disgrace when her son "ruins" Rosa Brown, so
she decides to move from her neighborhood to "the low west side of town," in order to
show her anger against his action. She says: "Don't care if I never see that boy Again to
the end of my days. He wrung my heart like a chicken neck. And he made me a disgrace.
Don't come to tell me he's dyin'. Don't come to tell me he's dead. But tell me if'n he take
that gal And get her decent wed" (Black 24). Booker T’s action and his refusal to marry
the girl shatter the hope and moral vision of his mother. Booker T has gone against his
mother’s sense of "advancing the Race” by refusing to marry his impregnated girl friend,
but he knows the social consequences of his mother’s rejection. Mrs. Martin Booker T is
an authority figure who wants to see that African Americans abide by moral principles and
build their families on them. Booker T’s mother believes that strong moral sense is needed
for what she calls "getting ahead” or what Paula Gidding refers to as “race progress”(179)
Brooks also expresses, in most of her works, the need for moral vision among AfricanAmericans to come out of social and economic constrictions, as well as to achieve class and
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economic mobility. Mrs. Martin Booker T’s sense of morality and brooks’ moral vision may
appeal the syllabus designers of Pakistani education institutions and this poem can be a good
choice to teach brooks to Pakistani students. The consciousnesses of Brooks’ mothers are interconnected and the ideas of each mother are a part of the total vision.
The decision of Big Bessie to throw her son out reflects her image as a ‘maker’ for
she is preparing her son for future and her intense awareness of the social, political, and
economic states that African Americans are in. She knows if her son is to become a "New
pioneer," he must discover and nurture within himself the ability and strength to rely on
one’s own power and resources. Her message is the utterance that we hear repeatedly
from female narrators, women and the mothers in Brooks’ works. She says, "New pioneer of
days and ways, be gone./ Hunt out your own alone./ down the street” (Black 400). In a
patriarchal society, it is normally the father who instills this kind of consciousness into his
children, but here Big Bessie tells her son to "go down the street." The street is the symbol
of life, particularly life in Bronzeville. These mothers are the mentors of their children,
symbols of resistance against injustices and unethical practices. This image of strong and
powerful person, which is usually associated with male figure, represents one of the
multi-facets of the roles of mothers in Brooks’ works—In other words, they are a part of
the whole image of motherhood that Brooks continues to develop through out her career.
The mothers in Brooks’ works have moral strength. They respond in a creative
manner to crisis situations that are related not only to family or domestic matters, but also
to those of national significance. Mother, in her poem, “the mother” makes clear another
dimension of Brooks’ development of the role and image of motherhood. She, the mother, is
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a woman with strong nerve, for she can fearlessly and explicitly admit her crimes or sins and
has the boldness to hint at the causes that compel her to do these deeds. She (mother) shows
her assertiveness and moral courage by bringing up controversial and forbidden issues
like abortion. Brooks gives voice to a poor mother to express her feelings and reasons to
commit such a heinous crime according to social and moral values of that time, so that
the society may hear the voice of these poor victims and feel their miseries and woes. The
mother, in this poem, destabilizes the traditional concept of nurture, so that society may
realize the false values that it has built around itself.
Brooks’ “The Mother” is a pungent and bitter comment on the society that kills
innocent African American youth for petty mistakes. In this poem, the mother kills her
children or aborts them so that they may not be killed by others. In this way, she not only
reveals the cruelties of the majority community who lynches and murders blacks because
of their race and color, but also brings to light the abject poverty that compels African
American mothers to abort. In “the mother,” the structure of the address, as Barbra
Johnson has pointed out, is shifting and complex. The mother's dramatic monologue
begins as an address to “a generalized reader” (Erkkila 199), but there is a confusion of
‘speaker’ and addressee,’ ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ and ‘agent’ and ‘victim.’ The second
half of the poem is a direct address to her aborted children, "dim killed children.” The
mother expresses her love for them in a powerful style, but she does not lose her
emotional poise. She controls her emotions and does not allow it to become
overpowering. The beauty and strength of the poem is that Brooks does not allow the
reader to be overwhelmed by the complex emotions of the mother but she keeps the
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reader focused on the social, economic, and psychological issues that she wants to
highlight.
The mother claims that she loves her dead children and that she has killed them:
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and
your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. (Black 21)
Brooks’ mother aborts her children not only for the fear of the killing by the
majority community but also the oppressive weight of poverty. ‘Mother’ in Brooks’
poem is aware of her maternal responsibilities, obligations, and motherly love and
affection for her children. She is also conscious of the heinousness of her crime. Her
action raises many questions: Why does she kill her children if she loves them? Why
does she commit this cardinal sin? What do her repeated assertions of love for her
murdered children signify? All these questions draw our attention to injustice, inequality,
poverty, and violence in society that are killing the poor, illiterate, and deprived youth of
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ghettos. However, ‘mother’ in Brooks’ poem complicates the ideal of motherhood by
asserting that matricide is an expression of love. In this poem, Brooks reestablishes for
the black mothers, as Emily J. Orlando has pointed out, a certain degree of control and
authority over their bodies with her suggestion that childbirth is not “a passive endeavor
and in fact involves a choice"(Tarver and Barnes 65). This choice renders them powerful
enough to subvert the conventions and traditional beliefs of mother and motherhood
imposed upon them by the dominant culture. Brooks deliberately chooses a controversial
subject like abortion, which was considered odious by all the social and moral canons of
that time, to shock the readers so that she may jolt their senses and impress on their
consciousness the nature of the crime that racist and sexist society is committing on poor
black mothers. The image of mother in this poem is that of a destroyer, but even in her
act of destruction, we can see the role of a preserver because by aborting her children she
is saving them from lynching and killing at a mature age when they can feel and realize
the pain of injustice and racial discrimination by the racist majority community as well as
the painful existence of violence, poverty, and inequity in African American
communities.
Brooks’ poems are deeply grounded in her experience as a black woman and a
black mother. Her historical experience and her awareness of the reality of the "whitegowned democracy" (Black 49) of America seemed to have shattered her faith in
democracy and God, for both of them could not protect and save African-Americans from
racial injustice and discrimination. We can see this disillusionment with American
democracy and God in her sonnet sequence “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” particularly in the
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sonnet, entitled, "firstly inclined to take what it is told": "Thee sacrosanct, Thee sweet,
Thee crystalline, / With the full jewel wile of mighty light—"(Black 71). In this sonnet as
well as other sonnets of the “Gay Chaps” sequence, Brooks expresses her disillusionment
with American democracy, patriotism, and God through the feelings and skepticism of
the African American soldiers who fought in the World War II. These lines, according to
Melhem, allude to the anthem, “America,” and this sonnet exposes its unfulfilled
promises and analyzes the disillusionment and skepticism of the African American
soldiers. As a sensitive soul, Brooks must have been looking for, as Betsy Erkkila has
pointed out, an “alternative system” (200) that would be conducive to the betterment of
her people, especially to black women. By the end of the World War II, she had become
familiar with “white perfidy” and realized that white culture could not give African
Americans their due and the black, which was identified with African American males,
could not give them their identity and make them visible, so she tried to search for a
system that would substitute the existing one. According to Erkkila, “she finds this
alternative system in black motherhood—a system she begins to construct in Annie
Allen” (200). The central theme of her second volume, Annie Allen is a search for
identity and the rise of black female consciousness that gives her the voice to protest
against and destabilize the oppressive system. It traces Annie's progress from girlish
defiance and vanity in the section, "Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood," to her
romantic ideas of love, marriage, and handsome “paladin,” and as well as her unpleasant
and bitter experiences in marriage in "The Anniad," to the poverty stricken and oppressed
life a widowhood and motherhood that lead to the rise of self-realization and social and
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political consciousness in "The Womanhood." The subject matter of the poem deals with
the social, emotional, psychological, and economic problems of black women and black
mothers. In the first section, Annie points out the narrowness of space, both in social set
up and home, which signifies a narrow room, restrictive choice, and social inhibitions for
black girls. In the second section her youthful dreams aroused by the Anglo-American
romance tradition of handsome and adventurous princes are shattered by the oppression
of her husband and an unhappy married life. The third section describes Annie as a black
mother, ‘maker’ who has attained social and political awareness. She is vocal about
hunger, poverty, and deprivation faced by the African American community at large and
black children, in particular. From the position of a mother and a maker, she urges her
children to fight for their due place in the society, as well as to struggle to create a
favorable space where their artistic talents may flourish. According to Betsy Erkkila, the
book narrates the story of a black woman's search for identity and power beyond her
“double subjugation” (202) as a black woman living under the laws of both black and
white patriarchy.
In Annie Allen Brooks gives readers insight into her conception of black
womanhood. Annie Allen reveals her rebellious nature at the beginning of the book
“Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood.” In the first poem of the section “the birth
in a narrow room," Annie (the narrator) alludes to the sense of entrapment and
confinement that a black girl, as well as a black woman, has to face in her life and poses a
possible question concerning the black girl's lack of “place and space” in the existing
social system that baby Annie might ask when she grows up: "How pinchy is my room! /
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how can I breathe! I am not anything and I have got/ Not anything or anything to do!"
(Black 83). Throughout the childhood and girlhood section, Annie's sense of
inquisitiveness and indomitable spirit prompts that "There was somewhat of something
other," and this sense urges her to question her mother's teachings to be grateful to God’s
blessings, domesticity, marriage, and resignation. However, this rebellious spirit is
overtaken by the romantic idea of love and fascinating dreams of handsome prince. As a
young woman, she indulges in the dreams of a prince and they have muted Annie's "inner
voice" for "something other." In the “appendix to Anniad,” she attains the insight into
the realities of life, and she cries out, “O! Mother, mother where is happiness” (Black
112) and this utterance can be seen as the transition from romance to reality. This cry of
agony is an enunciation of self-realization.
The central section of the poem, “The Anniad," is a mock-heroic poem. Brooks
applies this poetic form to expose the racial, color, and sexual discrimination in Annie's
society and the frivolousness of white romantic tales of handsome and brave princes and
the beautiful maidens waiting for them: “Watching for the paladin / Which no woman
ever had," (Black 99). It also reveals the tragedy of the black woman's situation as victim
of the white myth of beauty, which both black and white have adopted as their standard,
and they disdain and reject her because of her color and race. In “the Anniad,” we can
see the frustration and anger of the black heroine for the unattainable standards of beauty
as defined by the white culture: “Think of thaumaturgic lass/ Looking in her lookingglass/ At the unembroidered brown; / Printing bastard roses there;/ Then emotionally
aware/ Of the black and boisterous hair,/ Taming all that anger down.” (Blacks 100)
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Annie's tamed down anger reflects Brooks’ own anger against an impossible ideal of
white female beauty that is the criterion accepted and recognized by black and white men
alike. We again feel the disappointment of a black woman when a "man of tan," the
"paladin" enters her life, with the preconceived image of male "dominion." He comes
with the mind which is already infected by intraracial color discrimination that prefers
light color to black and that depreciates Annie's "sweet and chocolate" womanhood.
“The Anniad” describes the conflict between Annie's romantic notions-dreams of
fairy tale’s love and marriage, and the realities of practical life, where the romance ends
and tragic drama begins--her grief begins with the agony of the separation, when her
husband leaves for war, returns to her but he has lost his manly power, wants it again:
With his helmet's final doff
Soldier lifts his power off.
Soldier bare and chilly then
Wants his power back again. (Black 103)
He wants his power back, so that he may regain his dignity. The paladin leaves her again,
this time, for "a maple banshee," but finally comes back again to Annie to die of his
"overseas disease."
After all these sufferings, traumas, and setbacks, comes a change in Annie. This
change indicates Annie’s attainment of self-realization and self-consciousness, and her
desire for an alternative system. Now she is coming out of the old conservative values
imparted by her mother and fascination of Anglo-American mythology of romantic love.
She experiences this epiphany when Annie cries out, “Oh mother, mother, where is
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happiness?" in an "Appendix to The Anniad" (Black 113). From now on, Annie, the selfdefined and self-conscious mother, will adopt the voice of struggle—protest that is
framed in Biblical and militant diction. This development in Annie’s voice also marks the
shift from the third-person, mock-heroic language of “Anniad" to the first-person black
female voice of a socially and politically conscious mother. Annie finds her own voice
and speaks in “black female expression” only after she extricates herself from old
conservative values taught by her mother and white mythologies, and she visualizes the
changed system that is conducive to her children. Brooks realized that without finding a
voice of her own, no change or improvement can come to a woman’s life. Much later, in
1980s, bell hooks, a prominent black feminist theorist, points out in her book, “Talking
Back,” the necessity of “finding a voice” as a “metaphor for self-transformation” (12).
With attainment of voice, Annie not only acquires the identity but also gains “a source of
self-actualizing power and social vision” (Erkkila 204). It is not by chance that the
transformation in Annie comes after she has become a mother. We see the same kind of
transformation in Maud in the novel, Maud Martha, (1953) who also attained the power
of articulation when she becomes a mother. In most of her early poems, the mothers have
voice and they subvert and destabilize the conventions and traditions through their
utterances.
Brooks’ display of her erudition and mastery in technical skill in “The Anniad” is
what Houston Baker Jr. calls “mastery of form” (33), through which African American
writers create their own voices. On the other hand, the mock epic provides a shield or a
cover to satirize without the fear of any reaction or retaliation from the main stream
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readers, as well as critics. Brooks hides the sting in her satirical voice by covering it with
moral tone and aesthetic qualities. Brooks’ targets of satire are not individuals or
communities; but her aim is to subvert the institutions and agencies that are responsible
for oppression and injustice in society. Hers is a mild and imperceptible satire without
malice or cynicism. The aim of her satire is to expose the evils and vices in society so as
to rectify them.
Brooks had a broader vision of transformation of African American women. Her
vision is not only the transformation of one or two individuals; rather her message is one
for change for the whole African American community. Annie’s lessons of self-dignity
and resistance are meant not only for her children but also for every black child. Brooks’
message through Annie Allen, the militant mother, is loud and clear that the
transformation will come not from outside—from the old systems based on white social,
cultural, and political hegemony, but from within black people themselves, as they
subvert and destabilize the predominant culture and reconfigure a new milieu for
themselves. As Betsy Erkkila describes, “Thus, the book that began enmeshed in what
Brooks called the ‘mysteries and magic of technique’ ends as a call to black action that
anticipates the more direct and hortatory voice of the female preacher and orator in her
later verse” (206). In Annie Allen, we can hear the powerful voice of a mother who is
challenging the injustices and inequalities in the society and the message:
Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.
Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late for having first to
civilize a space
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Wherein to play your violin with grace.” (Black 118)
This call to “civilize a space” is tantamount to creating a new system or a new
environment so that they may create music and harmony with “grace.” It foretells the
black feminist ideology of 1970s and militancy in the African American women of the
last quarter of the 20th century.
A long time before the rise of black feminism in the last quarter of 20th century,
Brooks realized that black women need the voice and consciousness, as well as to change
their role from ’make’ to ‘maker’ to assert their identity as black women and to transform
their denigrated images and effectively convey their feelings. Brooks never claims herself
to be a feminist, but her ideas of black womanhood, her concept of the role and place of
women in the society anticipate the black feminist movement. She, in fact, is one of the
few women who have given voice, subjective position, and central roles to black women
in African American social, cultural, economic, and political life in 1940s-50s. The
women in Brooks’ works are indomitable, strong willed, and diligent. They should be
admired for attempting to get the most out of their essentially narrow and occasionally
drab lives. Whatever their shortcomings, Brooks’ women, particularly her mothers have
asserted themselves stoically, without asking questions or whimpering. It may be that
they have a deeper understanding of modern life than any of their privileged sisters;
perhaps, they are the only ones who understand the secret of survival and the meaning of
dignity and self-defense.
The most prominent voice and image in Brooks’ work is that of the mother. In
fact, Brooks gives a new dimension of struggle to black women through the voice of the
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mothers in her works. Brooks’ mothers give new consciousness and guidance, not only to
the women of her generation, but also to coming generations of black women who have
proved that they are the daughters of Brooks by the dint of their unprecedented
achievements in every field of life, especially in the field of literature. They have
transformed their image from chattel slaves, prostitutes, and sex objects to Noble
laureate, Pulitzer Prize winners, top ranking businesspersons and politicians. The dreams
of gaining a respectable place in the society, and the desire to prove their worth come
from Brooks’ poor, lowly mothers, who voice and articulate their dreams, aspirations,
ambitions, as well as their apprehensions and anxieties boldly and clearly. Almost all the
important messages, radical ideas, awareness of one’s identity, and the moral courage to
take pride in one’s race, color, and role have been conveyed through the speeches and
utterances of Brooks’ mothers. The progress in Brooks’ poetic career can be judged by
the growth in the role and stature of her mothers. The voices of the mothers in “the
mother,” A Street in Bronzeville(1945) and “The Boy Died in My Alley”(1975) show the
shift from individual to communal voice and individual awareness to collective
awareness. Brooks very subtly uses her women, particularly the mothers, in classical
forms that she skillfully transforms to serve her purposes, in order to highlight the anger,
struggle, protest, and subversion of the predominant social and political culture. By using
speeches and utterances of women and mothers in transformed classical poetic forms,
Brooks is trying to reconfigure a new identity for African American women and a new
value system in which they will be able to live with respect and dignity.
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The study of Brooks’ woman Characters, particularly the mothers, can help the
Pakistani students, who are interested in rise and growth of the Black Feminism and
exploring the social, psychological, political, and economic problems being faced by
African American women. The inclusion of Brooks in the syllabi of Pakistani academic
institutions will be a good addition because it will enable Pakistani students to understand
American literature from cross-cultural and multi-national and social contexts. It may
also render a new dimension and vision to the students who are exploring feminism in
international perspective. Brooks’ woman characters can serve the Pakistani students of
feminism to analyze and understand the social, economic, and moral problems that are
being faced by Pakistani women and their causes in broader context.
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CHAPTER III
TRADITIONS TRANSFORMED: FORMS OF PROTEST
IN THE EARLY POETRY OF BROOKS
Despite Gwendolyn Brooks’ belief that art is inherently political, she has always
used classical and American poetic forms for her own political ends. In her early works,
she has addressed such social and political issues as blackness, oppression of
womanhood, and poverty. Her poetry is characterized by black political-struggle,
resistance, protest, and subversion from her first to her final work. An example of her
usage of classical poetic forms for political ends would be the manner in which she uses
the ballad and sonnet forms, with some modifications, to adopt a parodic voice in order to
destabilize the conventional and accepted values. Brooks also uses Anglo-American
literary device of the anti-hero to subvert preexisting identity of African American
women. Almost all of her female characters, particularly, the mothers, are anti-heroes.
Brooks does this as a challenge to the traditional concepts of hero and heroism, so as to
create a new image for black women, as well as to subvert social and moral systems that
stifle their ambitions and aspiration. Brooks’ poetry exemplifies the effective use of
classical poetic forms for political purposes, and she managed to do so without sacrificing
the aesthetic value of her works. Brooks manages to skillfully maintain the balance
between aesthetics and politics in her poetry, thus proving herself to be a true master of
her trade, as well as a paragon of social and political awareness.
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Like Gwendolyn Brooks, Pakistani woman writers, also use traditional Urdu
poetic forms with some modification in themes and diction to subvert the preexisting
identity and ideas relating to women, as well as to lodge their protest against gender and
class oppression. Feminist poets in Pakistan frame their new, distinctively feminine and
political voice and defiant expression in innovative poetic forms. The body of work that
they have produced reflects their struggle, self-awareness, self-respect, and desire for
change. They are using transformed traditional poetic forms as an agency to challenge the
restrictive choice that are allotted to women and gender discrimination. They are
articulating their feelings and opinions on once prohibited subjects for them to express
openly, such as gender discrimination, female sexuality, politics, and social issues. The
writing of Pakistani feminists is, as Kishwar Naheed remarked in an interview with
Rakhshanda Jalil for the Indian daily The Hindu (4/11/2001), an attempt to redefine the
man-woman relationship. In fact, this redefinition of the relation amounts to destabilizing
and demolishing the culture and value systems that have depicted women as timid and
frightened creatures that can be led by nose. The image of woman that emerges from the
writings of Pakistani feminists is a woman who is pragmatic in approach to life, who does
not allow men or circumstances to push her around, and who has indomitable will to
resist oppression and injustice.
Pakistani feminist poets usually use classical poetic forms such as Nazm and
Ghazal to destabilize and challenge the identity and status conferred on them by narrow
minded religious scholars and male chauvinists. A nazm is “a well organized, logically
evolving poem where each individual verse serves the need of the central concept or
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theme of the poem”( Urdu Poetry Archive). The nazm is traditionally used for narrative,
descriptive, didactic or satirical purposes which adopt an objective voice. There is a longstanding tradition of utilizing the long Urdu nazm as an instrument of social and moral
reform in the past by the old masters. Though a nazm is traditionally written in rhymed
verse, nazm is also written in unrhymed verse, or even in free verse. Poets of the nazm
are therefore free to adopt any metrical arrangement that suits their subject or mood.
The nazm gives freedom to the poet to choose the themes and metrical
arrangements according to his or her emotional and psychological conditions, but the
ghazal restricts their choice because the ghazal has rigid rules which must be observed.
A ghazal is according to K.C. Kanda, a collection of couplets (shers or ashaar) which
follow strict rules, for example: every ghazal must have a matla. A matla is the first sher
of a ghazal, and both lines of the sher must end in the radeef, the word or phrase that is
repeated at the end of the second line in every couplet. The ghazal is a short poem,
generally of seven, nine or at most, of a dozen couplets in the same meter. It always
opens with a rhyming couplet. Its main theme has been love. According to Professor
Gilani Kamran, the love that is celebrated in the ghazal is “mystical love”, but Kanda is
of the opinion that it can be “earthy or ethereal.” Kanda further states that the ghazal
treats the theme of love, “because of the exigencies of its form, in a characteristically
condensed and suggestive manner, with the aid of images and allusions, without stating
its case directly or in detail.” Despite the fact that the scope of traditional ghazal was
very narrow and restrictive that one feels that it may have the potentials to serve the
larger interests of life and society, but the ghazal, in the hands of the master-poets, has
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proved its potentials to deal with the whole range of human experience. Pakistani
feminist Urdu poets also transform the contents of the ghazal and use it to voice their
struggle against and subversion of the predominant systems and culture.
Pakistani feminist poets, like Brooks, who applies restrictive forms of poetry,
such as the sonnet, and relatively less rigid forms, such as the ballad, use the ghazal,
which has rigid rules of length and the discipline of the rhyming order and the ‘nazm’
which is not bound by the restriction of length, or by the strict observant of the rhyming
order. Pakistani feminist poets effectively use the ghazal form despite its brevity and
suggestiveness. They clearly express their message and ideas in just two lines. This
ability to compress their message and ideas gives them added advantage for they can
convey their subversive messages without offending the male authoritative voice, for they
are not addressing directly, rather they use suggestive diction. The ‘nazm’ enables them
to articulate their view points in a more discursive style, and enables them make a more
profound and minute exploration of its themes. Pakistani students, as well as serious
readers, are attuned to the practice of transforming the classical poetic forms for political
resistance, social change, or subversive purposes in feminist poetry. In this way, Brooks
and her poetic style would not be unusual or strange for Pakistani students of Urdu and
English poetry.
One of the salient features of Brooks’ poetry is the tension that she creates
between aesthetics of classical forms and the politics that we find in new Negro poetry.
The aesthetics of classical forms is often associated with the standards of the dominant
culture that is notably characterized by elitism, academy and white domination, while the
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politics of "New Negro" poetry is marked by resistance, subversion, and protest. Houston
Baker Jr., in his book, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, defines a term, which he
coined himself, “mastery of form” (33), which is meant to signify an agency through
which African-Americans can find or create a voice for themselves. It also helps to
transform African-American folk literary forms into art forms that are recognizable in
white mainstream culture and literary criteria. In her work, Brooks bends and molds
classical forms and blends them with Afro-American literary forms. She also has great
control over her poetic diction, which is a fine mixture of Standard English, French and
Latinized phrases, black colloquial idioms, and womanist vocabulary. She is particular
about aesthetic quality in her poetry but her aestheticism is a subtle amalgam of black
aesthetics acquired from blues forms, other black folk traditions, and the aestheticism of
western forms and culture. The aesthetic values that she envisaged in her poetry is AfroAmerican, i.e. it is neither purely black nor white, but rather a fine blending of black folk
and spiritual values and the forms and traditions of western literature. However, she does
not take refuge in the leafy world of the nightingale or in the “fair attitude” of the Grecian
Urn, rather her poetry is steeped in the mundane, sordid, unpleasant and ugly realities and
experiences of ghetto life.
Although, in her commentary, Brooks speaks of beauty and truth as her aims in
the creation of poetry, the reader can observe that she does not usually abide by the
conventional standards of beauty. George E. Kent, brooks biographer, in his article,
“Aesthetic Values in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks,” also points out that such qualities
are not necessarily qualities of the aesthetic object or situation, but qualities of the
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aesthetic experience afforded by the form when it is closely engaged. It means that for
brooks, the fusion of the reader with the work of art in an act of total perception is the
ultimate source of beauty and truth. Thus, the primary aesthetic value of a given poem is
in the act of visualizing and hearing it. Brooks’ vision of aestheticism may be described
as a subtle blending of modernist depiction of modern life particularly that we find in T.
S. Eliot’s poems, the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the “Waste Land,” and the
themes and strains that we find in African American folk poetry. Hence, her aesthetic
vision differs from that of both the black and white traditional concept. The aesthetic
qualities that we find in Brooks works are a realistic and conscientious “imitation” of the
qualities and conditions of the people, objects, and circumstances that she comes across
as a sensitive poet. Kent defines the concept of imitation that he finds in brooks poetry, as
“the creative and imaginative engagement of values, either actual or possible, in the range
of circumstances stirring the artist's mind to action” (Mootry and Smith 30). The
circumstances stirring the artist's mind to action are the problems of identity, poverty,
oppression, and the sense of exile created by the social, cultural, and political systems of
America. Brooks’ efforts are devoted to making the mainstream realize the existence and
reality of African-Americans, as well as attempting to bring an end to the alien status that
has been imposed on them by white culture. the aesthetic qualities of her poetry comes
from the form, not from the object or the situation and it depends on the reader’s ability
to see and hear or what Kent describes as “the fusion of the reader with the work of art in
an act of total perception” (31). Brooks’ poetry gives the reader a range of experiences
that it is possible for an individual to undergo within the human experience: beautiful and
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ugly, good and bad, banal and sublime, happy and sad. Brooks’ poetry is a reflection of
the circumstances and experiences that African-Americans face and undergo in their
every day existence. However, we cannot confine this experience to a particular
community or class because it concerns a broader human experience of injustice and
oppression based on gender, race, color and class. Here in lies the beauty and strength of
her poetry.
From the beginning of her poetic career, Brooks has believed that art has a
political function. Despite early reviewers and critics’ assertion that her poetry is above
race and color, we find her poetry political, the black politics, in particular, that is based
on resistance against and subversion of the predominant systems, which are characterized
by racial, gender, and color discrimination and injustices. Brooks’ poetic career may be
looked at, as Betsy Erkkila has suggested, as a struggle to negotiate the conflicting
demands of aesthetics and politics. Her predecessors in the Harlem Renaissance and the
Protest groups of 1930s and 1940s had already set a precedent of the impossibility of
black art being divested of politics. The black writers of the Harlem Renaissance used
their intellectual discourse and literary works as a vehicle to expose the lies and
distortions about African-Americans and their culture by the white majority. In the
1930s-40s, the naturalistic protest school, which possessed a radical political ideology,
led by Richard Wright, used African-American literature as a powerful organ of political
ideology to call attention to the oppression, injustice, and inequalities of the race relations
in American society. According to bell hooks, “every aesthetic work embodies the
political, the ideological as part of its fundamental structure. No aesthetic work
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transcends politics or ideology” (Talking Back 136). Brooks’ poetry is appreciated by
mainstream critics for its aesthetic qualities, but she never loses sight of the political
problems of Black Americans.
Brooks’ aesthetic qualities are primarily embedded in classical forms that she
utilizes to express the feelings and experiences of black women and mothers. She
chooses to write in predominantly Anglo-American forms most probably because of her
education and training in modernist techniques, as well as the insight into the
significance of forms that she got from the poetry workshop conducted by Inez Stark
Boulton in 1941. Another factor of her choice to utilize classical forms may be the advice
of James Weldon Johnson. In his reply to a letter from Brooks, he advised her to read the
best of modern poets, not to imitate them but to develop the highest standards of selfcriticism. The suggestion encouraged her to continue her effort to write good poetry. The
dominant ideological tendency during Brooks’ formative years as a poet-1930s and 40s
was characterized by a radical political ideology, as presented in Richard Wright’s The
Native Son (1940), which made a furious attack on the American racial caste system,
signaling a new era in the cultural dynamics of American race relations (Robert E.
Washington 119-20). However, Brooks was raised in a too conservative of an
environment and “reformist middle-class democracy” to be allured by Wright's
“elaborate intellectual structure (Kent 56), which is marked by Marxism, and a desire to
escape from “a simple middle-class consciousness” (Kent 56). In fact, African American
literature of 1930s-40s was characterized by Marxism and anti-middle class morality. It
was natural for a young blooming writer brought up in a conservative family to be
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influenced by classical traditions and not to be attracted to the radical ideas of Wright, as
expressed in his article "Blueprint for Negro Writing". In this article, Wright attacks the
African American writers who keep their writings aloof from the Negro experience and
who are more interested in entertaining the white audience than a black one. He
advocates Marxism and also believes that it will give a clear vision to a writer about the
struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people. It does not mean that there was no change
in her vision when her conservative values and ideas came into contact with that new
radical ideas of 1930s and 40’s, indeed, there were some. However, these changes were
not radical, but subtle. Brooks’ early poetry is an earnest effort to fuse Anglo-American
traditions with African American poetic traditions. Her poetry is a fine fusion of classical
poetic traditions, such as the ballad and the sonnet, and black themes, allowing her to
skillfully blend blue strains and elements of folklore and black spirituals with those of
classical forms.
Apart from her early training and influences, there are other factors which
attracted Brooks to traditional classic forms. The use of lyric poetry to convey messages
of revolution, protest and subversion is by no means a new one. It can be traced back to
English Romantic poetry, as well as to her immediate predecessors. Brooks also uses
traditional lyric poetry to protest and subvert systems that are outcomes of the evils of
discrimination, oppression, and injustice. She adopts varieties of poetic forms, but she
seems to be fascinated by the sonnet and ballad forms in the early days of her poetic
career. Brooks’ attraction to the sonnet can be traced to the influence of the New Negro
poets, particularly Countee Cullen and Claude McKay, her immediate literary
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predecessors of the Harlem Renaissance. From these poets, Brooks learned that the fourhundred-year-old popular form, the sonnet, could be used as a devastating weapon of
protest and that “the inherent tensions in the sonnet's syllogistic structure could be used to
argue against racism and social injustices” (Mootry and Smith 166). Gladys Margaret
Williams has pointed out, that early in her career brooks writes short, but intense poems
in the manner of powerful Afro-American folk forms, which are characterized by
genuineness of feeling and passion. This sensitivity to short and intense poems may have
spurred her inclination toward the sonnet form, whose movement is also short and
intense. Like the blues, the spirituals, and the folk seculars, the sonnet also makes their
impressions quickly on mind of the audience thus create a close tie between the poet and
the audience.
Brooks’ penchant for innovation may be another reason for her attraction to the
sonnet form. Through the ages, the sonnet form has undergone great changes in its
themes, structure and rhyme scheme. The sonnet form, which originated in Italy where
love was its central and quite nearly its sole theme, was used by British sonneteers for
political, social, and religious purposes. It is perhaps, the flexibility of the sonnet form
and presence of the provision for innovation that made Brooks adopt the form. It is
something natural that the “protean” qualities of the form should appeal the sensibility of
the poet who is bending and molding the forms without breaking them (Gladys Williams
216).
Brooks concentrates her attention on “imagistic compression, ironic
understatement, and temporal and spatial dislocations” in her poetry especially in the
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Children of the Poor sonnet sequence (Mootry and Smith 168). These features make her
sonnets different from the styles of earlier sonnet writers. As Kent and other critics have
pointed out, she participated in the modern poetry class and writing workshop of Inez
Stark Boulton in 1941 and it supplied a systematic exposure of techniques and points of
view of the modem poetry. She had been writing poetry before this, but according to
Brooks herself, she had not known much about the technicalities of poetry writing. It was
in this workshop that proper and mature grooming and training of her poetic talent took
place. Boulton’s rigid stylistic training made Brooks a somewhat difficult poet because of
her tendency to merge modernist techniques and African-American traditions. Her best
work, such as the sonnets form the sonnet sequence, “children of the poor,” adopts not
only the protest tradition of the New Negro poetry, but also the traditional and
contemporary styles of European and American poets. In short, it is the flexible quality of
the sonnet forms and the subtle maneuvering of these diverse and complicated traditions
that provide the metaphysical quality of her verse.
Brooks, in the manner of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets,
incorporates profundity of thought and complexity of emotion and range of feeling into
her poetry. She employs archaism and erudite diction in her sonnets. This feature of her
poetry seems to be incongruous with her commonplace and apparently simple subject
matter. She is well informed in literary forms, present day philosophical trends, scientific
and technological advancements, social and political happenings, and emotional and
psychological issues in her society. In her poetry, Brooks applies her knowledge to
demonstrate metaphysical wit that is characterized by the use of syllogisms to create
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harmony in apparently dissimilar ideas, for example, the comparison of hungry children
to “stone” and “seed” in the sonnet “what shall I give my children?”, first shocks the
readers, but when they try to understand the various connotative meanings of the
imageries and link them to the conditions of the children syllogistically, they realize that
they are apt expression to bring out the miseries and deprivations of the poor children.
She, like the 17th century meta-physical poets, also uses uncommon and unusual language
and diction that is a mixture of formal and colloquial idiom in her poetry, especially in
her sonnets.
In short, a combination of thorough knowledge of the potentialities of forms well
known by African-Americans and the intellectual pleasure she received from her study of
the poetry written in English language and Anglo-American forms, influenced Brooks in
the 1940s to adopt the sonnet form and transforms it according to the requirements of the
time and situation.
Brooks uses the sonnet form, to which she adds some of the elements of AfricanAmerican folk traditions, as well as the politics of Negro poetry, to cater to the needs and
demands of her audience in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the remarkable thing about
Brooks’ sonnets is the way in which she maintains the tension between aestheticism of
poetic art and the political aspirations of African-Americans. For instance, Brooks uses
the sonnet form to protest against the discrimination in the American armed forces in
“Gay Chaps at the Bar”, Brooks” first published sonnet sequence, which appears in her
first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). This series of 12 sonnets is based on
letters written by African-American soldiers to the poet. Brooks avails this opportunity to
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expose the failure of American democracy and the American dream. Each sonnet is
composed in iambic pentameter with some variations of the rhyme schemes of
Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets. The sonnets 3, 4, and 5 are Shakespearean, the
sonnet 7 is Petrarchan and the sonnets 2, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12 are a combination of
Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets forms. In such combination, the rhyme scheme of
the octave is Shakespearean and that of the sestet is Petrarchan. The rhyme scheme of
sonnet 1 is the variation of Petrarchan and sonnet 9 is a variation of Shakespearean
pattern.
In this sequence Brooks depicts war as a tragedy that has shaken faith in American
democracy and God. The mood of the sonnets is, in the beginning, one of despair,
containing meditations on death, yet towards the end their tone gradually becomes
aggressive. The opening sonnet, "Gay Chaps at the Bar," sets the tone for the sequence.
“Bar” in the title has a variety of meanings—it can mean a place of revelry or a liquor
shop, seen in another light it can be understood as relating to law, a law-court, and
justice, it can also be interpreted as a racial barrier. More generally, “Bar” can be taken as
the bar between life and death or we can interpret it as barrier that stands between African
Americans and the achievement of American dream and the fulfillment of the promises
that are made to every American in the anthem.
The first six sonnets deal with meditation on one’s own death that of one’s
friends, and also the narrator’s questions dealing with the usefulness of soldier’s
sacrifices. They also express nostalgia for the comfortable life and anxiety for life after
the war. Melhem, while discussing the history of the work’s publication, remarks that
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Brooks wanted the sonnets "Piano after War" and "Mentors" to be placed together, as
they both meditate on the profound change that has come after the World War II and the
futility of the sacrifice of the African-American young men and women, as well as the
uselessness of their premature deaths in the War. They also allude to, as Melhem has
pointed out, “the lost-generation” feeling which will not allow survivors to enjoy the
civilian life because they have seen and experienced how their values have been trampled
and how people have killed one another, thus savagely throwing overboard all the norms
and values of civilization. In the seventh sonnet, we observe a change in theme as well as
tone and the sharpening of critical edge. The question in the seventh and subsequent
sonnets is not death, but loss of faith in God and American democracy. Sonnet 8
describes a soldier's profound reassessment of his patriotism, addressed within the
context of received beliefs. It also analyzes the unrealized claims of the anthem. From
now onward, disillusionment with God slowly, mounts up, and it also extends to earthly
attachments. His/Their initial despair turns into aggressive mood. The sonnet sequence
ends in the collective voice of the black soldiers, as well as with notes of anxiety, fear
and call to resistance: “How shall we smile, congratulate: and how Settle in chairs?
Listen, listen. The step Of iron feet again. And again…wild” (Black 75).
Brooks' sonnets are formally quite different from earlier sonnets in her “avoidance
of exact end-rhyme, employing instead near rhyme, slant rhymes, assonance, alliteration,
and, on occasion, no suggestion of rhyme” (Schweik). Brooks’ rhyming pattern draws
our attention to the rhyming conventions of different types of sonnets. Her use of a rhyme
scheme which utilizes “the not-quite rhymes,” makes her works differ from a regular
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Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet, which are symbols of high aestheticism, culture, and
literature of the middle-class. Brooks’ application of different sonnet forms which
deliberately fail to observe conventional rhyming patterns, not only subvert the middleclass values but also makes fun of its hypocrisies and self-imposed criteria.
“Gay Chaps at the Bar” is about the war—the war abroad, as well as the war at home.
The African-American soldiers realize that although they have won the war outside of
their home country, they need to continue their war at home against racism, injustice, and
sexism. As Ann Folwell Stanford points out, the war was not simply being fought in
Europe and the Pacific but it was also being fought at home against racism, as the sonnets
are “embodying the slogan of the ‘Double V’ (Stanford 199) (victory abroad and victory
against Jim Crow at home). Perhaps the sonnets, as Stanford claims are also prophetic
warnings for they look not only back at the devastation of war, but also forward toward
the revolution and rebellion that was to come in the Sixties.
Another traditional poetic form that Gwendolyn Brooks uses is the ballad. Gordon
Hall Gerould, in his study of the European folk ballad notes that, "the sorrows peculiar to
women serve the ballad poets . . . for some of their most poignant moments"(48). Most of
the ballads found in America are based on the Anglo-Celtic ballad tradition and their
popular themes are sexual struggle from the female point of view. But, under the puritan
influence, the British paganist themes were replaced by themes of repentance and doom.
Until the latter half of 19th century, broadside ballads, which were written by
professional composers, printed on cheap paper, and sold on the streets were popular. The
themes of broadside ballads typically differed from Anglo-Celtic ballads, which focus on
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love affairs. American broadside ballads tended to focus on the celebration of maledominated occupational experiences, such as logging, ranching, and mining, as well as
sensational topics like disasters, murders, and tragedies. From this American tradition,
black ballad tradition arose. In which, “reflecting an actual event or action with real
historical characters, and where the flow of text was highlighted by an emotional mood of
grief or celebration, rather than a plot line.” was represented. (Debby McClatchy)
Brooks continues the thematic aspects of the European folk ballad tradition, often
infusing them with features of the black ballad; however they often contained
modifications in the central characters, who are typically women, as opposed to men.
Brooks adds nuance to her literary ballads through the use of additional folk elements
from Afro-American spirituals and the blues tradition. Her use of the ballad reflects her
desire to recover a simpler, more direct poetic form. It also reflects her belief that the poet
should "vivify”(Report from Part One 146) the commonplace." Yet, as is mentioned
above, Brooks goes beyond the mere imitation of ballad themes and techniques to create
more varied and complex structures. In this way, as Mootry has stated that her ballads
tend to be simultaneously simple and direct, as well as deeply ironic and complex, both in
theme and technique. Thus by transforming the traditional ballad Brooks tries to meet the
demands of her multiple audiences, those composed of readers, critics, and publishers
that look for aesthetic qualities and universality, as well as the common audience that
looks for familiar structures and social or moral or political messages. Mootry notes that
through this process, Brooks “recovers the ballad tradition by using its themes and
techniques; she reinvigorates that tradition by infusing it with new themes and variations;
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and finally, she critiques the tradition by using parodic techniques” (Mootry 279). The
result of this process is the exposure of prevalent, often unpleasant, ugly, and bitter truths
about both black and white American society.
The central theme of "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" is the “pathos of
interracial discrimination,” (Mootry 280) one of Brooks’ recurring themes. Mabbie is
ignored or is rejected by the boy with whom she is infatuated, due to her darker
complexion, and he instead befriends a girl with lighter skin. The pathos of Mabbie’s
love story is that she is punished in the form of rejection by her love interest, not for any
flaw of character, but suffers this mental and emotional agony solely due to the darker
color of her skin. Her crime may be considered a social one, for she exists in a society
which looks down upon dark complexions. Mabbie who has been waiting for her love
interest outside the school gate, is left in the company of other boys and girls of dark
complexion. However, the poem ends on a hopeful note, for Mabbie, as she finds the
strength to redefine her identity and reconfigure a new value system, finds comfort and
empowerment in the company of her new “chocolate companions”. Brooks, in her
autobiography, states her thoughts on how a black woman should behave in such
conditions:
She is a person in the world—with wrongs to right, stupidities to outwit,
with her man when possible, on her own when not. . . . Therefore she
must, in the midst of tragedy and hatred and neglect . . . mightily enjoy the
readily available: sunshine and pets and children and conversation and
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games and travel (tiny or large) and books and walks and chocolate cake.”
( Brooks, Report 203)
Brooks is, in fact, urging black women, or one might even say every woman, to develop
resilience quality in their character that she may survive any situation and lead the life
with dignity and grace. Specifically, “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” tells the story of
seven-year-old Mabbie who falls in love with her classmate, Willie Boone. She waits for
him outside the grammar school gates. But, Mabbie's "lover" slights her and opts for “a
lemon-hued lynx / With sand-waves loving her brow” (Ibid). At the end of the poem,
Mabbie is left to her "chocolate companions" and to her own resources: “Mabbie on
Mabbie with hush in the heart. / Mabbie on Mabbie to be” (Ibid). This message, pressing
the importance of relying on one’s own resources, is one that Brooks relates to her
African-American readers in a great number of her poems, and it is, generally, a recurrent
theme in her works. We find the same message in her 1963 poem, “Big Bessie Throws
Her Son into the Street,” in which Bessie tells her son, “You have your destiny to chip
and eat. [. . .] Hunt out your own or make your own alone. / Go down the street” (Black
400).
The "Ballad of Pearl May Lee" like “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie” deals
with the themes of “white perfidy” (Melhem 39) and color discrimination based on
standards of white culture which inspires African-Americans to value light color. This
poem enhances the theme of “black-and-tan motif” that we find in the “ballad of
chocolate mabbie”. Pearl May Lee, the narrator, tells Sammy of his preference for white
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color and his distaste for black complexion, At school, your girls were the bright little
girls.
You couldn't abide dark meat.
Yellow was for to look at.
Black for the famished to eat.
Yellow was for to look at.
Black for the famished to eat.
For this desire of white meat, Sammy has to pay the price with his life: “But you paid
for your white arms, Sammy boy, And you didn't pay with money. You paid with your
hide and my heart, Sammy boy, For your taste of pink and white honey,” (Black 60).
In the poem, the white woman seduces the black male, and the interracial couple has
sexual intercourse in her Buick, which symbolizes the white middle class. The white
woman’s seduction of Sammy and her sensuous behavior is meant to portray the
hypocrisy and moral aberrations in white society. The lack of justice and white perfidy
are highlighted by the false accusation of rape by the white woman and the subsequent
lynching of innocent Sammy by a white mob.
There is a notable change in Brooks’ narrative technique in the “Ballad of Pearl
May Lee”—from the third-person narrator, a feature of the European ballad to the firstperson narrator, an element of the Afro-American blues tradition. We can also notice a
number of blues elements, which are masterfully blended with traditional ballad
features. The sudden change in scenes and episodes in the drama of Sammy’s seduction
and lynching is, on one hand, balladic and, on the other hand, it is a salient characteristic
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of the blues tradition. According to Mootry, the imprisonment of Sammy reminds us of
"jailhouse" blues songs, while the lamentation of Pearl May Lee in the last stanza
belongs to the conventional ballad tradition. The fusion of traditional form and blues
enables Brooks to address multiple audiences and to expose and satirize the double
standards and false values of white society. The mixture of ballad and blues forms also
helps Brooks to foreground women and their eccentric sorrow, color discrimination and
suffering, both mental and physical.
“The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” differs from the first two ballads in which the
central figures are women in that the main character in this ballad is a strong and
powerful male figure, as one would find in the black folk ballads of Sterling Brown.
However, although Rudolph Reed is the central figure in the ballad, the heroic action
belongs to Rudolph’s wife, who resolves to preserve her children and move them forward
through resistance and struggle against oppression, discrimination, and injustice. She
does so with remarkable grace and dignity. Brooks’ ballad tells the story of a black hero
who becomes the victim of apartheid, social, and political injustices. In this poem, she
uses the ballad form as a vehicle to send a strong political message about the
consequences of political and social injustices and oppression.
Rudolph Reed takes desperate action because he expects significant social
change to result from political solidarity between two communities. He expects that
political transition would be followed by changes in social values. However, his
racist white neighbors, who refuse tolerate, let alone form a positive relationship
with, a black family, react with hostility— throwing stones at the Reed’s home and
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even directly injuring Reed’s daughter, Mabel. Maddened by the spilt blood of his
daughter, Reed goes out to avenge his daughter’s injury:
Then up did rise our Rudolph Reed
And pressed the hand of his wife,
And went to the door with a thirty-four
And a beastly butcher knife. (Black 378)
After hurting four white men, he is killed by the white neighbors who kick his
corpse spitefully and call him “nigger”.
In the final stanza and the last scene of Rudolph Reed’s drama, we find his
“oaken” wife changing “the bloody gauze.” According to Melhem, the mother’s act
of changing the bandage signifies the African-American women and mothers’ stoic
and determined attitude, which anticipates future struggle on the part of the AfricanAmerican community, whose strength largely comes from the traditional stoicism
and struggle that is here associated with black mothers. Melhem remarks that the
strength of the mother in the ballad is “more potent than the rocks that have been
thrown” (Melhem 115). The poem ends with the image of the mother nursing her
daughter, which gives the impression that she is ready to face the challenge posed
by her hostile neighbors and is prepared to shoulder the responsibilities that society
and circumstances have laid on her
Here, Brooks destabilizes conventional definitions of heroism, honor, and
bravery. According to traditional ideas of hero and heroism, Rudolph Reed is a
heroic figure and his action is of heroic dimension for like the traditional heroes of
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African American ballad, he is strong and powerful man and his action is a heroic
action, as it is taken to avenge his daughter’s wound. For many readers and critics
Reed’s action may be a heroic deed but, I think the action of his wife is more heroic
than Reed’s for she resolves to live with dignity, face life with grace and shoulder
the responsibilities of the family after the death of her husband. It is the wife who
bravely faces the hostile neighbors with grace and dignity, because she not only
tries to heal the wound inflicted by the society and apparently, is ready to assume
new roles that the society and circumstances have imposed on her. She, unlike her
husband, does not resort to violence but bravely faces the problems. Her action is a
sublime action because she is nurturing and preserving the lives of her children. In
fact she is leading the life in creative fashion for she is enhancing the life, not
destroying it: she is a preserver, not a destroyer.
Readers and critics may, of course, interpret Brooks’ poems according to
their own understandings, cultural background, and social situations; however, if
we look at her works objectively, we find that they are primarily black in subject
matter and thematically. From the beginning of her career, Brooks’ concern has
been the problems and sufferings of the down and out African-American
community. She expresses her anger at the injustices and maltreatment meted out
to the poor blacks of the ghettos in larger American cities, as well as the common
people of the street. She protests the oppression of and discrimination against
African-Americans in general and black women, mothers, wives, lovers, and
professionals, in particular. Moreover, she subverts the systems that limit their
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choices and the assigned perverted images and degrading roles of black women.
Her works aim at giving a powerful voice to black women, transforming the
conventional images of black women imposed upon them by white culture.
Brooks was writing at a pivotal time in African-American history, as they were
entering a new phase of their social, political, cultural, and literary life. It was a
time of great transition in American society and culture. Brooks realized that
African-Americans must make integral changes in themselves and their selfimage if they want to transform their fate. In “Big Bessie throws her son in to the
street” Bessie advises her son:
You have your destiny to chip and eat.
Be precise.
With something better than candles in the eyes.
(Candles are not enough.)
At the root of the will, a wild inflammable stuff.” (Black 400)
Almost all the messages of change, resistance, and protest stem from the female
characters in Brooks’ early works and most of her female characters, particularly
mothers, are unconventional and non-conformist.
Brooks adopts and adapts the traditional classical poetic forms, as well as free
verse to convey her messages, ideas, and thoughts. She often parodies the content by
using these forms, particularly, those in sonnet and ballad forms, to make her readers,
both black and white, realize the restriction of choice that African-American men and
women have to face and the injustices, discrimination, and oppression perpetrated
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against them in white society. “Parody”, according to The Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics, belongs to “the genus of satire and emphasizes its etymology as ‘a
song sung beside’ a serious or tragic work, in order to provide comic relief through a
‘comic imitation’ that either heightens the original's chief characteristics or distorts them
to deflate the original's pomposity” (John Gery 46). One of the main features of parody is
to employ a serious style to express a subject that is odd with the style, in this way it
disturbs the balance of form and content. Brooks’ parody combines satirical format with
tension created between its content and expression. The tension in her poetry between
form and subject, especially when they are incongruous with one another, enhances
parodic effect. Brooks establishes a formal distance in her poems composed from within
the black community in order to devise a parodic voice “that ultimately suspends overall
characterization of race for both black and white readers, thereby opening up new
linguistic and ideological space.” (Gery 45) In other words, Brooks, in her works groups
together racial, as well as gender, identities, despite the fact that she gives them distinct
and visible shapes and properties. This destabilization of the identity sabotages
stereotyping of race, color, and sex. In fact, Brooks exposes and then subverts imposed or
constructed identities. To this end Brooks effectively applies the traditional figure of antihero. Brooks also uses insignificant, ordinary, unpleasant, and ugly subjects as material
for her poetry, not only to give respectability and recognition to black ghetto life and
experience, but also to subvert accepted ideas and values so that she might weaken or
destroy the conventional and received assumptions relating to the subjects (African
Americans)of her poems. Thus, parody creates a foundation for changes in social,
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political, and moral values that not only desperately needed, but also, through her work,
make them clearly visible.
Judith Butler, in the last chapter of her book, Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity explains that the power of parody comes from the realization of the transient
nature of individual identities and concepts that are being parodied—social, political,
gender, or racial identities, as well as the insight that an identity can be destabilized:
hence, a entirely new identity can be established, a reconfiguration of cultural values is
made possible. Butler reaches a conclusion, after thoroughly critiquing the analyses of
sexuality and ideology by different critics. She also puts forth a radical idea of gender
identity after deconstructing the theories on gender identities that states that sexual
identity is nothing more than a socially defined concept made up of practices, which are
repeated until they become recognized and accepted ideological and physical norms:
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency
from which various acts follow, rather, gender is an identity tenuously
constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized
repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization
of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which
bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the
illusion of an abiding gendered self. (Butler 140)
After establishing the fact that gender identity emerges only through repetition of
particular and meaningful acts, not from "nature," she implies that “intervention into this
ritualistic repetition" (Butler 146). of identity can initiate ideological and conceptual
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change She locates the social function of parody as Gery has pointed out in the disruption
of the dominant practices of gender and by extension race. Gery also remarks that
according to Butler, while parody may also express a sense of the exclusion of the
marginal from positions of power, it also exposes the lack of any "preexisting identity”
for, as well as the "regulatory fiction" (141) of, the dominant gender's role. What one
finds in Brooks’ early poetry is the exposure of the ephemeral nature of “pre-existing
identity” for gender and race, as well as the myth of superiority of race and color and the
dominant gender's role. This realization of the transient nature of the identities and roles
assigned to African American women and men enables brooks in the 1940s-50s to
subvert, destabilize, and finally transform the ideas and value system that make African
Americans women invisible and impose the identity of the creation of white culture and
ideology. Butler believes that successful parody can throw “all forms of identity into
question, if not into chaos, by generating "a subversive laughter in the pastiche-effect of
parodic practices in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves
constituted as effects” (146). Brooks, long time before Butler and the black white
Feminists of the later half of the 20th century realizes that parody could be used as an
agency to help reconfigure the social identity of women. This sense and realization of the
role that parody could play, forms Brooks’ voice in her early poems, like “Sadie and
Maud”, “Rites for Cousin Vit”, and “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi:
Meanwhile Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.” In this respect, Brooks, through her usage
of parody, seems to anticipate Butler and, in turn, the ideas of Butler and the Black
Feminist writers of the last three decades of the twentieth century appear to be the
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reverberation of Brooks’ voice, with some variations, created by distance of time and
space. Brooks adopts parodic voice in most of her early poems, particularly in the poems
in which women/mothers are central characters, and also in her long poem, “In the
Mecca” to subvert and destabilize the preexisting ideas and values. She parodies not the
form but the contents and through her anti-heroes, who are mostly black women and
mothers. The parodic voice that Brooks adopt through her women and mothers in her
early poetry is a agency to satirize the preexisting systems and destabilize the
preconceived ideas of African American women. The parodic voice in Brooks’ poetry
anticipates black feminist ideas of the1960s-80s. One of the salient features of black
feminism is the need to find an effective voice of black women, in order to articulate their
identity and to subvert the hegemony of white social and cultural values. Brooks knows
that a change in social arrangement cannot become effective without changing
mentalities of both blacks and whites. She adopts parodic voice and anti-hero figure to
convey her message so that the mainstream readers should not be offended and her black
audience may comprehend these grave and serious ideas in a light mood. Moreover,
parody and parodic voice are used by Anglo-American poets to point the follies,
weaknesses, and evils in the society so as to create the awareness among the readers.
When the society realize their injustices and oppression it has been inflicting on a
particular class or gender, it is easy to change the attitude of people as well as the system.
Brooks also uses parodic voice to make the society (both black and white) realize the
discrimination, injustice, and double standards it has been practicing, so that she may
change the attitudes of the mainstream toward black women and She realizes that the first
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thing that needs to be done is to call into question the epistemology that gives privilege to
males, a particular race, and lighter color within a given race. She challenges the
delimitations of knowledge defined by patriarchal systems and “calls for efforts to
expand cognitive capacities rather than accept principled limits to what can be known”
(Gertrude Hughes 395). The main theme of Brooks’ works is the removal of imposed
ideas about African-Americans based on propaganda of Western colonialism and
imperialism which branded dark nations as savage, ignorant, and soulless beings born to
be ruled by and be put to the service white, Christian nations. She attempts to reverse the
white tendency of equating "black" with terms of negative connotation. The aim of these
epistemological reforms envisaged by Brooks is to clear all recognized ideas and
believes of obscurity which equate "black" with inarticulateness, ignorance, and
inferiority and “white as enlightenment” and superiority (Gertrude Hughes 395).
One device that Brooks adopts to dispel this accepted social concept is her usage
of the figure of the anti-hero in her poetry. An anti-hero usually hails from the underclass
of society and is usually misunderstood his/her roles in the society. He/she is always
branded as rogue or unwanted person in a community or a society. The predominant and
privileged classes of the community or the society condemn and ostracize him/her by
labeling him/her as a picaro, seducer, or an ineffectual person, but he/she may be a hero
or a savior for common people. On the other hand a conventional hero “represents the
interests of his people and, honored by them, leads them into a future that his exploits
have secured for all” (Gertrude Hughes 384). Brooks uses classical poetic forms, in
which she depicts her characters, both male and female, as anti-heroes that disturb
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traditions that are degrading to blacks and, particularly, black women. Brooks challenges
conventional definitions of heroism, honor, and bravery, by giving the central role to poor
African-American men and women. To the mainstream white audience these lowly and
humble characters may be anti-heroes, but to impoverish urban black audience these
looked down upon persons are heroes and their actions are heroic. In this way, “antiheroic poetry can portray seriously what is traditionally dismissed” (Gertrude Hughes
384). In short, it is more accurate to say that to white audience these characters would be
anti-heroes Whereas to black impoverished, urban communities, these characters and
their actions are not anti heroic; rather they vaporize them as well as their actions.
Most of Brooks women, particularly, mothers are written as anti-heroes and their
adventures and actions are a combination of comedy and pathos. Brooks’ representation
of ordinary black women fighting and challenging the world through small, but
courageous and meaningful acts of social resistance and defiance is intended to bring
about a transformation of traditional male definitions of heroism. However, while she
carves a place for heroism in the domestic and maternal sphere, she also relates heroism
to acts of subversion, protest, and resistance, which are paradoxically expressed through
love, nurture, and social provision. Thus brooks ideas of heroism place it squarely within
African American experience of bondage and subjugation. For brooks, heroism means
persistent forms of resistance that maintain black dignity and subjectivity.
Brooks uses the ballad and sonnet forms, making sure to conscientiously observe
their mechanical rules and other elements of technical detail, in order to parody the
work’s content. That is to say that she applies diction and subject matter which lacks
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congruity with the form. Through this incongruity between form and expression, she
exposes disorder and instability in her society. Through parody, she shows the sense of
entrapment in and restrictions of choice in the life of African-American women, and men.
With the help of the figure of the anti-hero, she challenges accepted epistemology.
"Sadie and Maud," a short ballad, at first seems to tell a simple story of two
sisters. According to Gladys Williams, “this story is seemingly told by a child who
appears to be skipping rope outside an old house where one of two sisters, Maud, still
lives. The story is the history of the family told in light rhythms” (Mootry and Smith
209). The deeper question of the tale of Sadie and Maud is whether the story narrated in
the poem is the story of two particular sisters or if it is the story of every young AfricanAmerican woman that belongs to the ghetto. If we closely study the issues that are being
raised in this poem, or, in fact, any of Brooks’ poems, we find almost the same amount of
problems being faced by the women belonging to underclass of the African-American
community: if there is any difference, it is the matter of degree not kind. John Gery states
that "Sadie and Maud” like "the ballad of chocolate Mabbie" uses parody in a subtle way
to reveal ironies in the social options available to a black woman from the ghetto. Brooks
writes about two sisters with distinct temperaments, appearances, and life styles. Maud
conforms to conservative values of morality, whereas Sadie leads a more licentious life.
However, both of them have restricted choices in the presence of social constrictions,
especially meant for African-American women:
Maud went to college.
Sadie stayed at home.
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Sadie scraped life
With a fine-tooth comb.
She didn't leave a tangle in.
Her comb found every strand.
Sadie was one of the livingest chits
In all the land.
Sadie bore two babies
Under her maiden name.
Maud and Ma and Papa
Nearly died of shame.
Every one but Sadie
Nearly died of shame.
When Sadie said her last so-long
Her girls struck out from home.
(Sadie had left as heritage
Her fine-tooth comb.)
Maud, who went to college,
Is a thin brownmouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house. (Black 32)
Apart from the clear difference between Sadie and Maud, that of the contrast in
personality, life style, and vision of life but also a kind of contest between them. When
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one judges their achievements by conventional standards, we feel that despite her
defiance of the social norms and recognized moral values that urges her to abide by the
ideas of good woman, Sadie seems successful when compared to the colorless, drab, and
lonely life of Maud: “Maud, who went to college, / Is a thin brown mouse. / She is living
all alone / In this old house.”
Yet the parodic application, not only of the ballad structure, but of the
characterizations also, according to Gery, makes the reader skeptical about the moral
message and the problem of choice in the milieu in which Sadie and Maud breathe. The
metaphor of the "fine-tooth comb” with which Sadie pulls out "every strand" of life,
refers to her unrestrained sexual passion and her experience of giving birth, and is later in
the poem described as her only "heritage." In fact, this metaphor of "fine-tooth comb”
implies lack or the dearth of spiritual experience, not physical or financial hardships. Her
farewell to her two daughters, her “last so-long” symbolizes losses, not only in Sadie’s
life, but also in those of “Maud and Ma and Papa.” We can feel the change in Sadie’s
daughters, the receivers of her heritage, the daughters do not follow their mother’s
precedence of staying at home, rather, they decide to leave, like Maud, who has left home
for college. The last line of the poem describes Maud as "a thin brown mouse." It
describes not only her color tone but also her physical structure that indicates the lack of
vigor and vitality, but she survives Sadie, who apparently leads a vibrant life. The last
line also gives the impression that despite Maud's attitude towards sex conforms to the
middle class morality, she is not appreciated by the society for she is not integrated into
the mainstream of the society as she has to live alone in “the old house.” Brooks seems to
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be telling her readers through both Sadie and Maud, that in a society where there are few
alternatives in choice for blacks and which is guided by stringent social and moral laws,
that restrict human actions and confine human pleasures to certain patterns will not
appreciate any action that does not conform to its social and moral norms. Maud action of
leaving the house and going to college does not conform to the middle class morality that
according to Mance, it is not becoming of good women to leave their house for work or
on any errant. Maud ignores this social value and goes to college. She has to pay the price
for it in the form of isolation from the society and living alone in the big old house.
However, if we look at both the characters in the context of the prevailing social and
moral values, we find that both Sadie and Maud have opposed the accepted social and
moral values, as Sadie has contested the dominant sexual norms and Maud has
overlooked the new American middle-class social values that insists on domesticity as the
mark of the “True Woman” (Mance 1).
The actions of Sadie and Maud destabilize middle class moralities by blatantly
defying them. The white middle class may consider their actions bad, but for an AfricanAmerican reader, it is a gesture of defiance and subversion of false standards imposed on
their society by the predominant culture. Brooks’ intention, in presenting them as such, is
to destabilize middle class values and to bring to light the hypocrisies of the existing
social and moral criteria. In this society neither Sadie nor Maud is able to establish an
identity that is truly appreciated by it. The poem does not indicate the racial identity of
Sadie and Maud, until the end of the poem, where it describes Maud as “a thin brown
mouse” (Black 32). Yet, the reader knows that both the women belong to the African-
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American community because of the character portrayal of the sisters and because of its
hints at the restricted and limited choices that they have in their lives. Gery remarks that
To be either Sadie or Maud is, to use Butler's terms, to be falsely "naturalized" by one's
gender. The parodic structure of the poem unveils the "regulatory fiction"(141) of their
contest, even as it draws attention to their dilemma.
A casual reader who is not prepared, as Kathryne V. Lindberg has stated in her
article, “Whose Canon? Gwendolyn Brooks: Founder at the Center of the 'Margins',” “to
hear music in the heteroglossia that assaults the urban eye and ear” (285) may miss the
rhythm of anger, pain, subversion, and reconfiguration of new identity. An ordinary
reader is misled by the simple narration, set in the manner of a nursery rhyme rhythm,
and is swept away by its simple, yet deceptive music, a trait typical of Negro folk songs
and spirituals. Consequent upon, the reader misses the tragedy of African-American
women concealed in this simple artless form.
Brooks, like Shakespeare and John Donne, uses the sonnet form to parody
traditional ideas and satirize conventional concepts by adopting a parodic and satirical
voice in this traditionally serious and restricted poetic form: thus, she creates incongruity
between form and content. In her parodies, Brooks destabilizes the social and moral
conventions of the white middle class by depicting and glorifying so called ‘wicked
women.’ “The Rites for Cousin Vit” is the poem that celebrates and valorizes black
female “blues figures who wickedly defy the social and gender rituals of polite and white
middle-class society" (Erkkila 195). It is true that Cousin Vit throws middle class
moralities into confusion, as well as blatantly defying them, but her actions can not be
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considered to have been done “wickedly.” For the white middle class, it may have been
done “wickedly”, but for an African-American reader, it is a gesture of defiance and
subversion of false standards imposed on their society by the predominant culture.
Brooks’ intention, in presenting her as such, is to destabilize middle class values and to
bring to light the hypocrisies of the existing social and moral criteria. The incongruity
between the sonnet form and the content of the poem exposes the dichotomy between
white society, with its stringent social and moral laws, which delimit human actions and
confine human pleasures to certain patterns, and black society, where individuals like
Cousin Vit’s strive to live life fully and intensely. The sonnet begins the description of
Bit’s funeral: “Carried her unprotesting out the door. / Kicked back the casket-stand. But
it can't hold her,/That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her” (Black 125). Vit is so robust
and full of life that even death cannot contain her. The story of Vit is the celebration of
life. Melhem points out that her name is derived from the Latin word “vita”, meaning life.
Vit is true to the etymology of her name. Even in death, Vit demonstrates vigor and
vitality of life.
She is so full of life that it is well nigh impossible for her to survive in a world of
"stuff and satin aiming to enfold her". It is the world which does not forgive any one who
violates its social and moral norms and extracts “contrition” for any breach of its social
and moral codes. Vit’s world also locks its people in social and moral confinement. It
“bolts" on living and dead alike. The playful mood and satirical tone of the opening line
of the second quatrain “Oh oh. Too much. Too much," seems to be incongruous with the
occasion, but “Too much. Too much” reminds the reader of the second line of the first
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quatrain, “Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her.” Vit is so large that “life”
as defined by white society cannot accommodate her presence. This poem also censures
society for its indifferent and cold attitude and for its lack of effort to understand Vit’s
life and that of those like her. The parodic tone of the sonnet reminds us of Shakespeare's
parodic Sonnet 130 "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,” in which the poet
parodies the traditional theme of the love sonnets and in that the poet eulogizes his
beloved’s beauty. In this sonnet, Brooks is apparently, celebrating Vit’s vibrant life, but
in reality she is subverting the social and moral values that render African-American
women invisible.
The sestet gives a more elaborate description of what Vit's world contained during
her life. In the second quatrain, the narrator describes the kind of life Vit has been leading
before her death: “She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,/Back to the bars she knew
and the repose/ In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.” The first four lines of the
sestet provides a detailed description of Vit’s activities in the above mentioned places
after rising “in the sunshine”: “Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss./Slops the
bad wine across her shantung, talks /Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks/In
parks or alleys.” Her actions and dress indicates that she is going against the accepted
mores laid down for “good women” by the predominant culture. Her dress is an offensive
dress of women of pleasure--those usually found in nightclubs and juke joints. Brooks
deliberately uses the image of Vit slopping “the bad wine across her shantung,” in order
to shock her white middle class audience who confers invisibility to black women. Vit’s
actions and dress make her conspicuous and attract the attention of the audience, thus
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making her visible to the society who does not recognize her presence: in this way Vit’s
social, moral, and economic problems will be brought to light and the society can
understand it roles in making Vit what she is at present. Brooks also realizes that
portraying women as a pitiable and downtrodden section of society can not change their
identity and role. To transform their image the stereotypical characterization of oppressed
women should be replaced with a more aware and powerful characters, struggling for
their rights. Brooks portrays Vit as a woman who is trying to assert her identity by not
conforming to middle class values. Her talk is indecent or not becoming of a cultured
woman, as defined by the white middle class, for it is neither pompous nor earthly, “but a
mixture of the dramatic ‘pregnancy’ and the mundane ‘bridgework,’ mediated by talk of
the music of ‘the blues guitar’ in the nightclubs she frequents” (Gery 53). Finally, Vit
“comes haply on the verge of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.” The alliteration of "haply”
and "happiness" gives the sense of elation and an impression of approval of Vit's
perfunctory life style. However, the enthusiasm that we feel in these lines is not real
emotion. In fact, what the closing lines mean is that Vit has not actually received
happiness, but she has almost got happiness. She has come to "the verge / Of happiness,"
not happiness itself. Gery remarks that The word "hysterics contrasts "happiness" as
much as it complements it, just as "alleys" contrast "parks" and "bridgework" contrasts
"pregnancy." The poem ends with "Is," and this abrupt ending resonates with the abrupt
ending of Vit’s life. This copula verb is without a subject like the first two lines of the
sestet, but the reader knows that it refers to Vit. The subject-less condition of the verb
also suggests the identitilessness of Vit. It also gives the impression that although Vit "is"
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alive, not dead; her life is reduced to mere existence without the vitality. It conveys the
sense of passive existence rather than active life. “Is” can also be looked at as a contrast
to the verbs of doing in the earlier lines, such as, "does," "slops," "talks," and "walks.”
The sudden closure of the poem with the verb of being facilitates her message—how
white culture and values relegate African-American women to position of an object and
assign them passive roles. It is this sense of existing in a place of passivity that Brooks
wants to transform by instilling a sense of value on action and doing—on being the actor
and not the acted upon.
Vit, like other women of Bronzeville, has to negotiate with “undesirable choices”
(Gery 53) that her society and circumstances have offered her for survival. Her life, like
of that of her sisters, is marked by tenacity, struggle, and defiance, against preexisting
values, conventions, and identities. Brooks portrays her with resolve and respect and
seems to appreciate her spirit of defiance and struggle. But the parodic language of the
poem is skeptical about Vit’s character and her world. The reader is not certain whether
Vit is dead or alive. The change in the tense from past to present, and Vit's rising after her
funeral creates doubt about Vit’s status. In the same way, the is not sure about Vit’s
world because it is difficult to decide whether the praise of Vit is ironic and her world is
created to destabilize the preexisting world. Because the parodic tone gives the feeling of
lack of order in Vit's world through out the poem, but particularly in the sestet. And it is
this lack of order that not only kills Vit, but also destroys many women of Bronzeville.
Parody is a powerful weapon for Brooks to use in the destabilization of the
preexisting identities of African-American women and to subvert systems of oppression.
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She uses parody in her early poems such as "the ballad of chocolate Mabbie," "Sadie and
Maud," "the mother," and "the rites for Cousin Vit," "a song in the front yard,"
"hunchback girl: she thinks of heaven," "the vacant lot," “Mrs. Small,” “A Bronzeville
Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” and
others in order to destabilize the conventional image of black women and also to create
chaos in existing social and moral values.
Brooks’ poetry has always been political. She uses traditional poetic forms such
as the sonnet and the ballad to express anger, protest, and struggle against the restriction
of choice for members of the African-American community, as well as to destabilize and
subvert the prevalent systems, in order to reconfigure new values and systems. In her
early poems, Brooks’ aims seem to be to pull African-American women out of torpor and
degradation by giving them voice and destabilizing the identity that they have received
from their slave masters, and sexist white and black men. She skillfully applies traditional
poetic forms in order to attain her political and social ends. She saw new spirit and
identity among African-Americans during the 1967 Fisk conference and realized that, the
ideas and visions that she had been trying to convey to her audience in classical forms
and situated language should be expressed in simple, but powerful language and
American poetic forms. She shifts her mode of address from classical forms—the sonnet
and the ballad—to American poetic forms, such as free verse, and adopts more direct
expression. Between “The Bean Eaters” (1960) and “In the Mecca” (1968), she had seen
many changes in American society. She has seen that African-Americans had become
more conscious of their social and political rights and that they were struggling for them
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through peaceful means, as well as violent protest. At this important juncture, Brooks’
voice is the voice of a “cultural mother to the political project of black literary and social
creation” (Erkkila 197). “In the Mecca” marks Brooks’ transition from traditional
classical poetic forms to free verse, a typical American form of versification. This shift
also signals that she is ready to assume the expanded role that time and circumstance
have assigned her to perform. In short, there is no major shift in her political voice from
that which we came to be familiar with in her in her first three volumes of poetry, which
were heavy with classical influence in her choice of forms. This voice continues in “In
the Mecca,” which can be seen as a transition from one stage of her poetic career to
another. The development in her poetic career and political vision is a continuous growth,
not a sudden change. The change we notice is the change in her narrative technique. Her
use of anti-heroic women characters to struggle against and subvert the preexisting values
and to voice the feelings of women may not be strange to Pakistani audience, particularly
to the students in higher education intuitions for they are familiar with traditions of using
anti-hero to subvert and protest against gender oppression and class discrimination, as
well as to destabilize conventional middle class morality that is based on hypocrisy and
so called observance of decorum, for they are recurrent themes in Urdu literature and
electronic media. There are sections of the society who may not be able to appreciate
such characters, but they are small in number. Pakistani academic institutions are already
teaching anti-heroic literature written in English and Urdu and in my opinion it will not
be problematic for Pakistani students to assimilate brooks women and mothers who are
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mostly anti-heroes and are subverting the social and moral value systems that brand them
bad women and transform them into non-persons or lifeless objects.
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CHAPTER IV
DISPERSED NARRATION: SHIFT IN “THE MECCA”
Brooks’ art is a progression from one stage to another and one phase to the next.
Her art is one continuous whole, and we must view its unity, in order to completely grasp
her growth as a poet. In the previous two chapters, I have discussed how Brooks uses
women, particularly mothers, to subvert and destabilize existing ideas of black women
and to reconfigure an alternative system for them to exist within and relate to society, as a
whole. I have also discussed her adoption and transformation of classical poetic forms for
political purpose, as well as to make black women visible and to get their voices of
protest and resistance heard. She subtly blends traditional Afro-American folk literary
forms with classical forms to give an effective and powerful voice to African-American
women, especially mothers. By using the sonnet and ballad forms to subvert traditional
and imposed ideas and values, she destabilizes preexisting identities and systems. “In the
Mecca” is another facet of brooks’ growth as a poet and it demonstrates brooks’ mastery
on every technique that she has learned, so far.” In the Mecca” is a culmination of her
poetic art. In this poem Brooks continues the use of women and mother character and the
western literary traditions to struggle against and destabilize the preexisting ideas and
values, but her narrative technique becomes complex as compared to her early poems.
Despite Gwendolyn Brooks’ statement in her 1976 interview at the University of
Wisconsin-La Crosse, that her work falls into three periods which correspond to
"changes" in her perspective, a discerning and careful reader might not agree. There is no
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major change or shift in her poetry, so far as subject matter and artistic skills are
concerned. Nor did Brooks radically change her poetic themes and the role of mother. A
change that we do observe in her poetry is a shift from the white Anglo-American canon,
the sonnet and ballad forms to American tradition of free verse.
The dramatic poem In the Mecca, (1968) is Brook’s longest single work. Its 807
lines are divided into 56 stanzas of irregular length, ranging from 1 to 53 lines. It is
distinctive for its direct treatment of race and class oppression. It describes the erosion of
an aggressive system and is a bitter commentary on American capitalism and the
American dream. Melhem has pointed out that the African-American world that Brooks’
delineates through “In the Mecca” reflects the psychological and social isolation and
separation of black and white environments. This isolation and poverty, supplemented by
injustices and discrimination, compel “the embattled Mecca residents to arm themselves
with indifference” (Melhem 158).
The setting of the opening poem “In the Mecca” describes an actual black
tenement building, of Chicago called The Mecca. John Bartlow Martin describes It in his
article, “The Strangest Place in Chicago,” as the "great gray hulk of brick four stories
high, (87), Built by the D.H. Burnham Company in 1891. R. Baxter Miller considers this
date important because "it designates a post-Darwinian world,” (147) and according to
him it is also significant for American history, because industrialization had ended “the
dream of an agrarian world"(147), and urban progress and technology were replacing
communal and spiritual ideals. The Mecca was at first celebrated as a “boldly innovative
architectural prototype for luxury apartment living” (John Lowney 3). It was formerly a
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splendid palace, a showplace of Chicago, “with its atrium courtyards, its skylights and
ornamental iron grillwork, its elaborate fountains and flower gardens, the Mecca was a
major tourist attraction during the Columbian Exposition” (Lowney 3). By 1912, it
housed the black elite; the Depression of the thirties hastened its decline into a slum
building. The gradual degeneration of the Mecca building from a show place of Chicago
to African American ghetto, gives us insight into the ironic progression of the building,
which signifies the white cultural, social, and political domination and oppression: “from
modern urban palace the symbol of material progress” (Sheila Hughes 269) and wealth to
the sign of social and economic oppression and confinement of African American under
classes. “The actual Mecca building is a palimpsest, marking the processes of American
history” (Hughes 269). For Brooks, the Mecca has personal significance also. It was one
of the places where Brooks worked in her early youth as the secretary to a patentmedicine man, "Prophet Williams," who sells the magic and love potions in the poem.
According to Lowney,”Perhaps no other building symbolized post-World War II
urban decline more starkly than the Mecca Building” (Lowney 3). The Mecca building is,
as Erkkila has pointed out, “an ironically nuanced symbol,” (214) that signifies the
historic vision of America as Mecca or Promised Land, and “the Black Mecca of the
Nation of Islam envisioned by Malcolm X and other black nationalists”(214). The
discrepancy between the metaphorical expression of ‘Mecca’ and the Mecca building that
Brooks describes, gives insight into the difference between the American dream and
realities of African American existence. “In the Mecca”, from the beginning, tells the
readers that its message is “the collapse of old mythologies in preparation for a new black
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consciousness” (Erkkila 214). This message is the subject and theme of the poem and
that, in turn, instills the optimism in the poem. Brooks' description of the Mecca building
as Lowney has pointed out serves as a discourse to describe a dystopia in the context of
urban decline in relationship to postwar African American life. The dystopian Meccan
society- is the symbol of very bad life characterized by human misery, poverty,
oppression, violence, disease, and corruption.
Earlier Anglo-American critics deliberately ignored, or could not discern, the politics
of anti-racism and anti-sexism in Brooks’ poetry. They turned a blind eye and deaf ear to
the heteroglossic and dialogic elements in her early poetry and tried to obscure its
political and racial elements. They appreciated her classical forms, technical perfection,
and elevated diction of her early work and dismissed her later poetry as “flat and too
political” (Kathryne Lindberg 285). But, they failed to see that her poetry has been
political from the beginning of her career, as it is about African-Americans and their
social and political problems. She is addressing, directly or indirectly, an AfricanAmerican audience in her early poetry and the contents of the poems are always related
to African-Americans or about African-Americans issues. She has not given up any of
her early artistic accomplishments. As Henry Taylor states, “in strategy and style ‘In the
Mecca’ is an extension, not repudiation, of her earlier excellences.” (119) If there is any
change, it is in the shift from situated language or mask language to simple and
uncloaked expression of protest and subversion and in her art of narration, which has
become dispersed and more complex, for diverse subjects are speaking in multi-voice.
Also, her shifting subjectivity creates complication in narrative style. In “In the Mecca,”
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there is a multitude of speakers and each of them has his/her own idiosyncrasies in style
and language, but their speeches are either related to Pepita or sprung from Mrs. Sallie’
search for her.” In the Mecca,” “exemplifies every technique that Brooks had learned, to
this point, and is a culmination of her power to wield a flexible free verse” (Kent 218).
“In the Mecca” may be taken as a display of the maturation of Brooks’ poetic art, not as
the beginning of a definitive new phase of her poetry, even though she gives up
traditional Anglo-European forms and adopts free verse.
At first glance, the narrative framework of “In the Mecca” seems simple. It tells the
story of the search of Mrs. Sallie Smith, a domestic and mother of nine children, for her
youngest daughter. However, in the third line of the poem, "the fair fables fall," the
narrator makes the reader realize that this narration will be no straight forward and
predictable narrative, such as “Annie Allen” or “Maud Martha.” Annie and Maud are
transgressive, but the difference lies in the fact that they remain the centers of the
narration, whereas, in "In the Mecca,” there are subjectivity shifts: many speech acts are
performed by the narrator, as well as by the many subjects of narration. The action of
Brooks' poem, apparently, revolves around the search of Mrs. Sallie Smith, for her
missing daughter, Pepita, whom she and the reader ultimately discover has been
murdered. The reader is confronted with “a relentless narrator who compels the reader to
hear the stories--in multi-voice and multi-vernacular irony--of characters speaking their
own atrocities and failings which are contextualized, or framed, by a fictional Mecca,”
(Cheryl Clarke 139). Although The Mecca building was, once a reality, by the time,
brooks published her poem it had been demolished for 16 years. Brooks has recreated it
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according to her own vision, and it is not a historical document based on statistical data.
Thus Clarke is right in calling it a “fictional Mecca.” The style of narration, allusions to
the Holocaust and tales of cruelty and sufferings infuse the poem with mystery and fear.
Brooks’ narrative style in her early poems is marked by dramatic elements for they
are either dramatic monologue like in “the mother” and “Ballad of Pearl May Lee” or
monologue such as “the queen of the blues” or the direct interaction between mother and
daughter in “Jessie Mitchell’s mother. However,” the dramatic style of narration in “In
the Mecca” has become more complex and mature. In this poem of epic dimension,
brooks has merged the narrative style of Spencer in his allegorical epic “Fairie Queen” in
which different adventures undertaken by different characters are unified by the Prince
Arthur, who appears at the end of every adventure to give cohesion to diverse adventures.
Almost in the similar vein, Brooks use Mrs. Sallie, the mother and her lost daughter,
Peppita to render unity to the different stories narrated by the multitude of characters.
Along with dramatic monologue, monologue, and interior monologue, she uses in her
narrative technique, the elements of ancient dramas, in which most of the actions take
place in poetic description rather than on-stage action, due to limited resources in stage
craft. The art of narration in this long, complex narrative poem resembles that of early
Greek tragedians, such as Aeschylus, who by the power of words depicts the action on
stage. The narration of “In the Mecca” can be divided into different sections and the
speeches of various characters can be viewed as the speeches of the dramatic characters
in a Greek drama. Its different sections can be viewed as different acts of a drama and the
stories and incidences narrated by the characters as scenes. R. Baxter Miller divides the
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plot of the poem into three parts: Brooks opens the first scene of part I (Act I) with the
return of Mrs. Sallie Smith home from work. The focus of this part, or act, is on the
description of the neighbors that she encounters on her way to her apartment and the
introduction of her children. In this section, we see the narrator describing the characters,
as well as the characters revealing of their personal traits. In the second part (Act II), the
central action of the drama takes place. Mrs. Smith notices that Pepita, her youngest
daughter is missing. This knowledge of Pepita’s absence prompts Mrs. Sallie and her
other children to search through the tenement for the lost girl. This search, which is the
first of two, enhances the plot and allows the reader to attain deeper insight into the lives
of inhabitants of Mecca. It also allows for further characterization of more inhabitants of
Mecca.
The narrative style in this section is diverse. Through it, we can observe the
omniscient narrator sometimes adopting the tone of an objective observer and at another
time using a satirical tone. This part is also a reflection on the paradox of the American
myth. Part III (Act III) is the longest section of the poem, which makes up almost half of
the verse. In this Part/Act the police return and join the Smiths’s search. Because of its
themes and styles, such as the aggressive and open declarations of separation, liberation,
and violence, this section differs in tone from the other sections of the poem, as well as
from that of her early poems. Along with political themes, the theme of interracial sexual
relations and the betrayal of white men, rhetorical questions, and the use of Christian
mythology make Part III (Act III) the richest part of the poem, in ideas and thoughts, as
well as in narrative technique. The poem ends with the discovery of Pepita's dead body
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under the bed of Jamaican Edward. The narrator serves the role of the chorus in Greek
tragedy, and monologues, dramatic monologues, and interior-monologues of the
characters can be studied as asides and soliloquies of a drama. However, the central
action of the drama is Mrs. Sallie’s search for Pepita and through this poor mother brooks
exposes the folly and vices that are prevalent in the Mecca. Brooks uses this mother
figure to subvert and destabilize the predominant system.
Brooks’ narrative style in “In the Mecca” is a fine blending of highly sophisticated
poetic diction of Anglo-American narrative poetry and African-American oral and folk
traditions, as well as Black English. In “In the Mecca” the language and diction some
time change so abruptly that the readers need few moments to adjust themselves for the
transition from one narrative style to another, which is totally different from the first. For
example, line 255 introduces the central incident of the plot. Here, the narrative style
changes from highly formal to vernacular. From here onward, the narrator and diverse
subjects use different voices and style of narration to acquaint the readers with the
progress of the quest for the lost child. The dramatic shift from the narrator's heightened
style is clear, “What shiny tended gold is an aubade for toy-child's head! Has ribbons too!
Ribbons. Not Woolworth cotton comedy, not rubber band, not string. . . .” Then Sallie's
children’s reply to the question of their mother, "WHERE PEPITA BE?" in the Black
vernacular: "Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er /Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er”
makes the reader realize the existence of two worlds—the beautiful world of elite culture
and the mundane life of ghetto dwellers.
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The different narrative styles and voices also create an aura of confusion, which is
a prominent feature of the life of the inhabitants of Mecca. With the change in style and
diction from the refined diction of the narrator to the vernacular refrains of some of the
characters, the rhythm changes from sober and deep rhythm to urban black rhythm and
from the “sermonic rhythm” (Mootry and Smith 196) of Julia Jone to the litany of ”Ain
seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er /Ain seen er I ain seen er I ain seen er." This abrupt
change in music and pace of rhythm sometimes creates confusion for the reader finds
difficulty in adjusting to the change and also problematic for them to follow the
speakers. It also reflects the confusion and uncertainty in the under classes of African
American society. The discrepancy between the tone of the narrator, which is
authoritative, powerful, relentless, and judgmental and that of characters, which is
subjective, vernacular and sometimes ironic, gives an impression of distance between the
tone and style of the narrator and that of the characters. The diversity in narrative style
and multiplicity of voices in “In the Mecca” demonstrate Brooks’ maturity as an artist, as
well as it renders her more effective and powerful voice to subvert received ideas and
reconfigures a new value that will give a new identity and freedom from restrictions to
African-Americans.
One of the salient features of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry is the use of
voice/utterance to subvert and destabilize the preexisting identity of African-American
women and the culture that relegates them to denigrated positions. In her early poems,
she uses the voice/utterance of women, particularly that of mothers, to subvert
predominant systems. The voice/utterance, of Brooks’ female characters comes through
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in dialogue, dramatic monologue, or interior monologue. It centers on one or two
characters, but in “In the Mecca,” there are a number of subjects speaking in their own
voice and style. However, the unifying factors of these diverse characters and dispersed
narration is Mrs. Sallie, the mother and Pepita, murdered girl, who could have become a
poet, a woman with voice had she been not murdered. The voice and narrative style
changes with the change of speaker. With the shift in subjectivity the vocality also shifts.
For example, the narrator speaks in authoritative voice and elevated language whereas the
characters speak either in Black Vernacular or in ironical tone that is some time parodic.
Among the characters, we hear the voices that adopt various style: for example, Greatgreat Gram’s voice reminds the readers of slave narrative, Loam Norton tone is ironical
that is framed in the Biblical form and diction, St. Julia voice is enthusiastic and she
expresses her religiosity in ironical evocation of Psalm. In this poem, there are more than
50 characters but all of them do not speak in it because the narrator speaks for them. The
narrator lends her voice to those characters whose role either needs her interpretations
and comments or those who have no significance roles in the enhancement of the plot or
the themes of the poem. Brooks brings in some characters repeatedly to show the
progress in his or her thought or consciousness, such as Alfred who appears five times in
the poem. We see his growth from a failed poet to a poet with a vision, a poet who is
indifferent to the problem of his society, but interested in the ideas of foreign poets to a
poet who understands the immediate need of the Meccans—freedom from social,
economic, and psychological bondage through “essential sanity” and the collapse of the
Mecca building, the symbol of oppression, failed dreams, and abject poverty.
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This polyvocality creates complex and disperse narration. It is difficult for the
reader to keep pace with changing voices and styles, because the changes are dramatic
and sudden and sometimes the reader is not prepared for that transition. For instance, the
reader is still musing on the narrator’s rhetoric of Don Lee’s call for revolution, after
thought provoking lines on death, when they find themselves reading Alfred’s reverie
expressed by imitating a Biblical episode.
Says Alfred:
To be a red bush!
In the West Virginia autumn.
To flame out red.
"Crimson" is not word enough,
although close to what I mean.
How proud.
How proud.
(But the bush does not know it flames.)(422).
While we are still trying to comprehend the Biblical allusion in Alfred’s narration, we are
shocked by Amos’s violent, aggressive, and misogynistic voice, advocating violence and
revenge against America, which he portrays as a white woman. These different voices
come from different characters one after another, and the reader is baffled by diverse and
apparently incoherent vocality. Melhem points out, “From time to time, the poet's voice
modulates from objective narration to subjective, to style indirect libre, to protagonist
Teller. Yet the shifts cohere. Through Brooks' purposeful vision. . . the real and fictive
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worlds interact to present a social panorama”(158). The voice in the poem is
unpredictable because it keeps on changing from one mode to another, such as the
objective voice of the narrator, who describes the persons and events from the point of
view of an discerning but impartial observer. For example, the description of Hyena is
photographic, for she is portrayed without showing any personal feelings on the part of
the narrator: “Out of her dusty threshold bursts Hyena. The striking débutante. A fancier
of firsts. One of the first, and to the tune of hate, in all the Mecca to paint her hair sungold” (407-8). However, like the other inhabitants of Mecca, her response, (indirectly
narrated by the the narrator) to Pepita’s loss is also indifferent: ”She has not seen Pepita”
and then the narrator quotes Hyena’s direct comments, which reflects her indifference to
Pepita’s fate: “a puny and putrid little child”(Black 420). The narrative voice of
individual characters is subjective, for their responses are usually the reflections of their
personal experiences and opinions. For instance, Great-great Gram tries to relate Pepita’s
incident to her personal experience during the period of slavery, the story of her sister,
Pernie May, in slave narrative style:
Great-great Gram hobbles, fumbles at the knob,
mumbles, "I am seen no Pepita. But
I remember our cabin. The floor was dirt.
And something crawled in it. That is the thought
stays in my mind. (416)
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Great Grand Gram remembers an incidence belonging to her remote past, but she is not
aware of the present happenings. Like all Meccans, her answer also is, "I am seen no
Pepita.”
Mrs. Sallie Smith’s voice externalizes the conflict going on in the mind of the
anxious mother. Her voice wavers between hope and apprehension: “She comes soon
alone. / Comes soon alone or will be brought by neighbor. Kind neighbor. / Kind
neighbor. They consider” (419). But, this optimistic note changes into an interior
monologue of fear and apprehension, when she speculates on the other possibility of her
daughter’s fate in the context of intrinsic evil in human nature:
Suddenly
every one in the world is Mean.
Could that old woman, passively passing, mash a child?
Has she a tot's head in that shiny bag?
And that lank fellow looking furtive.
What
cold poison could he spew, what stench commit
upon a little girl, a little lost girl,
lone and languid in the world, wanting
her ma, her glad-sad, her Yvonne?(420)
In this poem there are more than fifty characters and every subject is an independent
speaker and he/she has his/her own voice.
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However, these disperse voices are given unity and cohesion through a
transgressive narrator and the omnipresent character of Mrs. Sallie Smith. "In the Mecca"
is a subtle blending of the multi-logues, interior monologues, and speeches that renders
depth and breadth to the narration and widen the vision and scopes of the poem, by
increasing its range, and revelations of Afro-American characters. It crosses the borders
of race and culture, time and space, and it continues to address, in languages of liberation,
both black and white, and Jews and Christians.
In “In the Mecca,” the assortment of subjects and variety of voices give the sense
of unity and harmony in diversity. Although each character speaks in his/her individual
voice and has an idiosyncratic personality and each voice and person can form a separate
poem, but search for Pepita and answer to Mrs. Sallie’s question gives the impression
that they have the same attitude to life and issues that surround their lives. However, the
combination of these voices and persons gives Mecca a sense of the world at large. Gayl
Jones remarks, “Its many voices enable Brooks' poem to operate on many levels at once
and to move in many directions (inward, outward, vertically and horizontally, or
backward, forward, up, and down).” (Mootry and Smith 194) The narrator can introduce
different characters into the scene and allow them to speak their external experiences or
their internal thoughts and feelings; they can transport themselves into their personal or
collective past of the suffering humanity or into the future. The polyvocality makes
possible the collapse of the historical and geographical, as well as racial boundaries. The
reader hears the stories in multi-voice, sometimes in the vernacular of the characters
speaking their own plights and failings in the context of Mecca and sometimes in the
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highly formal language of the narrator. The multiple voices and diverse subjectivity
render the poem aura of vastness.
Brooks’ style has never been simple, but in “In the Mecca” we come across
diverse voices of different speakers that are independent and inter-connected at the same
time. This polyvocality gives the poem an epic dimension to its subject matter and
canvas. It also enables Brooks to make African-American’s problems and issues more
visible to the world. She can also speak in vernacular without any cloak of situated
language or authoritative discourse. Brooks' strategies of shifting subjectivity, dispersed
narration, and polyvocality are more akin to the strategies of future writers like Toni
Morrison, than those of her predecessors.
The narrator in this poem appears to be a person watching a kaleidoscope and
describing it to her audience. Apparently, these pictures are disconnected and incoherent,
but if we read the poem as a continuous whole, we feel that they are coherent and
interconnected. In this kaleidoscope, the advent of a new character brings a new picture
of Mecca, which reveals a new aspect of the life in this mysterious building. These,
apparently diverse pictures are unified by the character of Mrs. Sallie Smith and Pepita,
who are at the center of the reader’s consciousness. The movement of the poem's 807
lines shows different pictures of Mecca to the reader. The hesitant and baffled reader is
dragged along by the insistent narrator, through the corridors of this picture gallery.
A sequence of pictures starts with Mrs. Sallie climbing the stairs of Mecca:
Mrs. Sallie
hies home to Mecca, hies to marvelous rest;
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ascends the sick and influential stair.
The eye unrinsed, the mouth absurd
with the last sourings of the master's Feast.
She plans
to set severity apart,
to unclench the heavy folly of the fist.
Infirm booms
and suns that have not spoken die behind this
low-brown butterball. Our prudent partridge. (405-6)
“Mrs. Sallie hies home to Mecca, hies to marvelous rest;” in this description we can feel
as well as visualize the urgency in Mrs. Sallie’s movement. The verb, “Hies” suggests
two actions and gives two sides of Mrs. Sallie’s picture: in the first picture, she is in haste
to reach home for “hies to marvelous rest”, we can visualize Mrs. Sallie’s hurrying
footsteps and energetic strides that are carrying her “home”-the place of “marvelous rest”
after a hard day’s labor. “Marvelous rest” is a dramatic irony, because the reader knows
that she will not get peace and rest in her home, for it will become the place of discomfort
and agony because of her lost child, Pepita, and her death. The second picture that the
readers visualize in the context of the original meaning of “hie” the derivative of Middle
English and old English “hien” and “hgian,” respectively, which means to strive, is the
picture of Mrs. Sallie as a “warrior” struggling against social, economic, and
psychological pressures or a fighter contending against poverty and, social constrictions
that have checked her social and economic amelioration and mobility. The image “sick
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and influential stair” reveals the poverty, depression, and hunger that surround the
inhabitants of the Mecca. The “stair” has, as Kent has pointed out, a personal meaning for
Brooks, for in her early days when she was working for the prophet (a phony) she used to
climb such a stair to deliver the merchandise of the prophet. It is also a traditional symbol
of climbing to higher place or mobility-spiritual mobility, social mobility, economic
mobility, and class mobility. However, Brooks “stair” is “sick” and “influential” at the
same time. The connotative significance of “stair” in Brooks’ poem may be looked in the
context of Langston Hughes’ poem, “Mother to Son,” in which the mother tells her son
that to change his lot, he has to climb the stair of life persistently. This persistent
climbing of the stair which is full of painful experiences, sufferings, dangers, and
obstacles is necessary for the social and class mobility:
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor -Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on (Langston Hughes 30).
In Brooks’ poem also the mother, the symbol of struggle and resistance, “ascends the sick
and influential stair” in search of “marvelous rest”. Although she knows that rest and
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peace is not for her, she dreams for it. The description of her demeanor: "eye unrinsed",
"mouth absurd", and "the last sourings of the master's Feast," gives a glimpse of her
psychic and mental makeup. According to Kent, “The ‘sourings’ are everything Mrs.
Sallie, as a domestic, has had to react to under the tightest discipline” (214). The
“souring” very subtly brings out her choleric and morose nature, which is the result of
drudgery and poverty. The image of a warrior that “hies” has created is enhanced by such
images as “set severity apart”, “unclench the heavy folly of the fist”, “Infirm booms”, and
unspoken "suns." As Kent has pointed out these expressions also suggests repressed
violence and inner explosion of anger and hatred. However, “infirm” indicates that Mrs.
Sallie is physically sick and perhaps emotionally and psychologically unsound, despite
her image of a strong and powerful woman. The narrator skillfully elaborates “folly,”
which obsolete meaning is lewdness or lasciviousness, by referring her as “brown butter
ball” and “partridge.” Both these expressions allude to her round and soft physical
appearance and sensuality: she is a sport for men. In short the picture of Mrs. Sallie as
delineated by the narrator is the epitome of life and conditions of the Meccans in general.
The sequence ends with the gruesome picture of murdered Pepita lying under the bed of
Jamaican Edward:
The murderer of Pepita
looks at the Law unlovably. Jamaican
Edward denies and thrice denies a dealing
of any dimension with Mrs. Sallie's daughter.
Beneath his cot
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a little woman lies in dust with roaches. (431)
These are not lifeless and static pictures; they are living pictures that appeal to our five
senses. We can not only visualize the images, but also taste, smell, hear and feel the
people and things.
The adoption of the disperse narrative style, the shift from western classical
conventions to American poetic forms, and tilting towards Black English demonstrate
Brooks’ maturity as a poet and progress from one stage of her career to another. They do
not mean that one phase of her career comes to an end and a completely new chapter
begins, rather we should look at it as development of the poet’s mind and moving
towards the perfection of her poetic art. “In the Mecca” shows advancement in Brooks’
poetic skills, especially the narrative technique and handling of diverse material, as well
as in the application of ‘voice.’ Her style, apparently, may have become simple, but
according to Melhem, it is the combination of Homer's "simplicity” and Milton's
"severity"(3) that serves her poetic and political purposes well.
Brooks has demonstrated her complex narrative style in her shorter poems, such
as “mother,” but we don’t find the diversity of subjects that one finds in “In the Mecca.”
According to Clarke, "In the Mecca" “is a frantic splitting of the narrative strategies of
showing and telling.” (138) Mrs. Sallie Smith shows us different characters, the dwellers
of Mecca, while she is combing all the floors of her building in search of her youngest
daughter, and the omniscient narrator, as well as the characters themselves, tells their
social, psychological, emotional, financial and other problems.
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The narrative art in this poem is both aural and imagistic in technique, for we see
the images of the characters through the telescopic lenses of Mrs. Sallie and the narrator.
We hear their voices from their own mouths and the mouth of the narrator, who
introduces the characters, comments on their actions and describes their thoughts. We see
Mrs. Sallie Smith through the eyes of the narrator, as she is the one who tells us that she
is a “low-brown butterball” (405). Also, Mrs. Sallie’s monologue delineates Pepita, our
“Woman with her terrible eye, with iron and feathers in her feet, with all her songs so
lemon-sweet, with lightning and a candle too and junk and jewels too?” (413-414).
We hear old St. Julia Jones' exuberant voice expressing her faith in an exaggerated
manner in the imitation of a psalm:
Isn't our Lord the greatest to the brim?
The light of my life. And I lie late
past the still pastures. And meadows. He's the comfort
and wine and piccalilli for my soul.
He hunts me up the coffee for my cup.
Oh how I love that Lord. (405)
The reader can see that her enthusiasm is not because of strong faith in God, but she is
pleased with her Lord for He satisfies her material and carnal requirements. Through the
character of St. Julia Jone, Brooks exposes the affected devotion and false zeal for
religion among the inhabitants of Mecca. They are religious in appearance and words, but
in reality they lack the Christian spirit of fellow-feeling and love for one’s neighbors. St.
Julia Jones may express her enthusiasm for religion and gratitude to God, but she is
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indifferent to the fate of Pepita and misery of Mrs. Sallie or the plight of other Meccans.
For brooks, the indifference to the problems of poor and alienated African-Americans is
an unpardonable sin and she uses the images of a poor mother and an innocent child to
expose and condemn this sin. The hypocrisy, exploitation, and oppression of Prophet
Williams are ironically brought out by the omniscient narrator: “and rich with Bible,
pimples, pout: who reeks with lust for his disciple, is an engine of candid steel hugging
combustibles. His wife she was a skeleton. His wife she was a bone. Ida died in selfdefense” (Black 406). The narrator’s description of lusty Prophet Williams gives insight
into how religious phonies, like Prophet Williams, use religion to exploit, as well as to
corrupt poor ignorant Meccans. The description of the nature and practices of St. Julia
Jones' and Prophet Williams provide some ideas of the confused and diverse nature of
religious belief and practice among the Meccans, as well as their moral degeneration.
Brooks’ narrative style is quite complex throughout the entirety of this poem. She
adopts, not only various techniques, such as apostrophe, inter-textuality, ironic evocation,
and allegory, but also multi-layers of voices. The allusion to the apostrophic address from
McKay’s sonnet, “If We Must Die: O kinsmen,” renders the narration complex. We find
the intersection of voices, in this reference to McKay’s poem. McKay wrote this poem
after the 1919 race riots, in which African Americans had been targeted by the whites.
McKay incites African Americans to live and die with dignity, not to bear humiliation
without struggle and resistance. He urges them to fight valiantly and die an honorable
death. The narrator/Brooks adopts the same tone in the line, "Kinswomen! /
Kinswomen!" and it reminds us of McKay’s call to his nation to rise up and oppose the
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oppression of the dominant class. As Clarke in her article has pointed out, this “interior
eruption”(Clarke 140) of the narrator, in Brooks’ poem may be looked at as a call to
African-American women to realize the sacrifices and sufferings in black women's lives,
bodies and souls, and signals further sacrifices and miseries to come "on this wise." This
call to “kinswomen” is a call to African-American women to rise up against male
oppression and injustices of the society, as well. It gives this impression, for it comes
after the description of Prophet Williams and his wife, who apparently died of her
husband’s oppressions and cruelty. Prophet Williams, the religious charlatan, is "rich
with Bible," but his wife, Ida, "was a skeleton / was a bone", "died in self-defense" and
“Ida died alone”(Black 405). The use of apostrophe in this line is meant to shake AfricanAmerican women out of meek submission to male oppression and to give them voices
with which to articulate themselves. However, According to Julia Kristeva:
Intertextuality implies a complexity of addresses immanent in the poem.
Intertextuality also refers to the fact that a textual segment, sentence, or
utterance is not simply the intersection of two voices in direct or indirect
discourse; rather, the segment is the result of the intersection of a number
of voices, of a number of textual interventions, which are combined in, the
semantic field, but also in the syntactic and phonic fields of the explicit
utterance.
In “Kinswomen” we find the intersection not only of many voices, but also in semantic,
syntactic and phonic fields. It is unusual for a black woman writer, in the midst of the
Black Art Movement to address her community, particularly underclass women of the
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ghetto as "kinswomen"--but in using this language, Brooks is also addressing and
evoking the language and conventions of high art, the culture of power, and thus speaking
to not only to the oppressed African-American women but also the culturally elite. The
use of elevated language, which common African American men and women may not
comprehend, also indicates that Brooks is speaking not only to blacks but also to the
society at large. On the other hand, Brooks may be using this mode of address to give a
positive image of African-American women and up-lift their status, because such rhetoric
was used by Elizabethan poets for the aristocracy and nobility. In this way, Brooks
renders dignity and respect that are associated with elite to lowly African-American
women, and enables them to move towards freedom from male oppression and
obtainment of self-affirmation. The adaptation of “Kinsmen” to “Kinswomen” not only
creates a new meaning, but it also combines vernacular and elevated discourse.
In "In the Mecca," the narrative style, in certain places, assumes a satiric tone, in
order to expose the sordidness, ugliness, and vices in urban ghetto life. The text ironically
evokes the Twenty-third Psalm, which gives hope and solace to humanity, in order to
expose despair, miseries, death, and decay in Mecca, the urban tenement. This Psalm is
usually sung on the occasion of funeral, and its adoption at this point also forebodes the
death of Pepita. Loam Norton, a non African American inhabitant of the Mecca, has not
seen Pepita and noticed sufferings of the African-Americans, but his reference to "Belsen
and Dachau," an allusion to Holocaust, with reference to the Twenty-third Psalm, renders
the poem a wider perspective and broader canvas. It also links the sufferings of and
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atrocities committed against two nations: African-Americans and Jews, during the days
of slavery and World War II respectively:
The Lord was their shepherd
Yet did they want.
Joyfully, would they have lain in jungles or pastures,
walked beside waters. Their gaunt
souls were not restored, their souls were banished.
.......
Goodness and mercy should follow them
all the days of their death.
In this ironical allusion to a Psalm, the message of hope, comfort, prosperity, and life is
replaced by expressions of despair, sufferings, cruelties, and death. For example, either
the narrator or Loam Norton, at this point the reader is not certain who is the speaker,
changes the subject of the Psalm from first person possessive adjective “my” to third
person possessive adjective “their.” In this way the narrator generalizes the inflictions
and woes and makes them impersonal experiences. Loam Norton’s substitution of
negative vocabulary and imageries for positive ones brings out the pessimism arising
from the cruelty, oppression, and misery that the Meccans have to face day-to-day. When
we place the original language and imagery of the Psalm and the language and imagery
of Brooks’ ironical evocation, we have better insight into the nature of oppression and
sufferings of the inhabitants of Mecca: “lie down in green pastures”/“they have lain in
jungles or pastures”; “He restoreth my soul”/“their souls were banished”; “I will fear no
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evil: for thou art with me”/“they feared the evil, whether with or without God”; “thy rod
and thy staff they comfort me”/“They were comforted by no Rod, no Staff,”; “thou
anointest my head with oil”/“Anointings were of lice”; “my cup runneth over”/”Blood
was the spillage of cups”; and “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
of my life”/“Goodness and mercy should follow them all the days of their death.” The
images of death, decay, sufferings, and oppression give the sense of rotten and
unwholesome atmosphere in the Mecca. In fact, the description comes from a non-black,
perhaps a Jew who survived the holocaust, and is framed in biblical poetic form, this dark
and bleak vision may be extended to conditions of the poor and suffering humanity all
over the world. However, we cannot say that pessimism is that of brooks, for it is
associated with one of the characters of the poem
The style of narration in the third person plural and the allusion to the Twentythird Psalm creates complexity in the narration, because it is difficult to distinguish
between the voice of omniscient narrator and that of Loam Norton. The narrator tells the
reader that he has not seen Pepita, but he seems to be more concerned with the Holocaust;
rather than present plight of Mrs. Sallie’s family or other Meccans. The narration then
abruptly changes to third person plural, thus creating confusion because the reader cannot
easily distinguish the speaker. Here, the speaker seems to be indulging in a kind of loud
thinking, in which the speaker is contemplating loss of faith in man and God. It reminds
us of the sonnet sequence, “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” in which Brooks, through the soldiers,
expresses loss of faith in God and failure of faith. The adoption of Biblical language and
style gives the poem seriousness and semblance of sublimity. The rewriting of the Psalm,
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with ironical evocation, renders a mocking tone and highlights the function of the
narrator as an interpreter and critic. Here the narrator is looking at the miseries and
sufferings of the Meccans from wider context and linking it to the sufferings people
belonging to different time and space. Thus She/he is commenting on the oppression and
cruelty inflicted against the weaker sections of the society and is critical about the role
played by God and man in this respect.
“In the Mecca” is, apparently, the story of a mother’s search for her loss child, but
close and analytical study of the poem reveals that it has many layers of meaning because
Brooks’ narration is allegorical in this long narrative poem. Mrs. Sallie Smith’s journey
through the Mecca building and her search for her daughter can be studied as the journey
into the consciousness of African Americans in search of self-identity and selfknowledge, as well as the liberation from social and economic bondage imposed by white
culture and value systems. Brooks, who has been trying to transform the identity of
African American women for 23 years, realizes that the key to freedom is the liberation
from the preexisting systems that stereotyped African American women as non-persons
and invisible objects. She uses mother figure, Mrs. Sallie, to convey her message, that
until the edifice of western culture and ideology, collapses, the African American cannot
hope for the change. This change characterized by free sky and free earth with the new
music screaming in the sun will come through What Alfred calls “essential sanity, black
and electric,” not through the violence that Amos advocates. Mrs. Sallie’s search for
Pepita, a seed or a piece of gold, may be taken as the search for the seed or the hope of
African American Future. During her search, she exposes the forces that are destroying
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the future of African American and makes her readers realize that if they want freedom,
they need to remove the evil and sins that are sources of indifference to African
American future.
The narration comes to an end with an allusion to a Biblical episode that depicts
Pepita as the possibility of redemption for and hopes for the liberation of African
Americans. The plot of “In the Mecca” is woven around Pepita and the central action of
the poem is the search for her by her mother and her brothers and sisters in the
accompaniment of the narrator and the law. Pepita has a symbolic significance for her
loss and death symbolizes the need for African-American society to reconfigure and reimagine a new identity and new consciousness. It is her death and victimization that
arouse a realization for the need for freedom from all kinds of oppressions, restrictions
and poverty. The death and removal of Pepita’s body from Mecca signifies the beginning
of the collapse of the Mecca building, the symbol of confinement.
Pepita never speaks in the poem and nobody sees her alive, but it is her silence and
invisibility that make economic hardships, oppression and discrimination of African
American women, as well as the problems of African-Americans as a community visible
and heard. Her dead body and the narrator’s comment, “She never went to kindergarten”
(Black 431) suggest that had she been given an opportunity, she would have been a
woman with voice, for she has the potentials to become a poet with powerful voice: "I
touch"—she said once—"petals of a rose. A silky feeling through me goes!"(432).
It is the ignorance or lack of knowledge of one’s self that makes African American
women non-persons and invisible. To come out of invisibility and subjugation, African
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American women need education (knowledge) that in turn will give them voice that will
liberate from social, economic, and gender bondage. It will also give them the ability to
express their dreams, hopes, and aspirations, as well as their anger and resentment. But, if
the society remains indifferent to destruction of Pepita, hope for future redemption of
African Americans, their dream of freedom from social, political, and economic
constrictions will remain forever deferred. Thus the death of Pepita is an eye-opener as
well as a loud and clear message to the African Americans to shake off the torpor and
indifference and to build a new milieu by demolishing the old edifice built by the
predominant culture and value system. Hence, there is optimistic note in the death of
Pepita, the seed that will resurrect when the conditions become favorable.
Pepita’s death frees her from the restrictiveness of racism and poverty. She has come out
of the Mecca building, although as a dead yet her departure signalizes the beginning of
end of oppressive and discriminatory systems signified by the Mecca building. Her
departure from Mecca creates a breach in the tenement. The fissure that the death of
Pepita has created in the faith of Mrs. Sallie in her people and place is also a rupture in
the structure of Mecca. It is the first step in the direction of collapse of Mecca, the
symbol of oppression, poverty, deprivation, and race, as well as gender discrimination.
Her death, can be viewed as the sacrifice for the redemption and betterment of her
community, and it is thus both a dismemberment of the Meccan "community" and the
sign of a needed re-membering and re-imagining of a more powerfully self-identified
Black community” (Sheila Hughes). Moreover, her death heralds the advent of
communal consciousness for the search for her brings the inhabitants of Mecca together
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and brings them out of their holes, where they are confined physically and mentally. Mrs.
Sallie may not be very loud in her protest and struggle against the oppression, but her
question to the inhabitants of Mecca, “Where my Pepita be” and their answer, “I ain’t
seen her” can shake the society and readers out of their indifference to sufferings and
miseries of underclasses of the society. The question of Mrs. Sallie and the response of
the Meccans to it can also make the readers realize the nature of relationship among the
Meccans or so as to say among African Americans and their indifference to the problems
of individual Meccans as well as those of the community. The voice of Mrs. Sallie is the
voice of every African American mother. It is the question or the cry that has been raised
by every black mother since the first slave mother landed on American soil. But Brooks
make it more poignant and audible by the use of a mother searching for her lost daughter,
Pepita, which means a small seed or a piece of gold. The search for Pepita, the seed
which can grow into a powerful tree of liberty for she has potential to become a poet with
vision and powerful voice, is not an ordinary search for a lost child, it is the search for
new identity and liberated voice and freedom from all kinds of constrictions and
repressions. The search for Pepita and discovery of her murdered body, make the readers
realize that the danger to African American’ future is not only from outside but also in
the community. Here unlike, in the other stories of sexual exploitation of African
American women and girls, in which the predator is a white male figure, in this poem the
culprit is an inhabitant of mecca and his name indicates that he belongs to the black
community. Brooks may be suggesting her people that they have to fight not only the
predominant community but also the members of their own community who are
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destroying the seed of their future because of their ignorance, poverty, and indifference to
the oppression and injustice from both black and white communities. Despite gloomy and
oppressive atmosphere, the poem is not pessimistic in the vision it presents to its readers.
Through Pepita, the narrator portrays an optimistic vision. As Miller has pointed out,
despite differences in sex and age, she resembles Jesus, who sacrificed his life for the
redemption of mankind. With this Jesus image, the idea of the possibility of redemption
of the Meccans (African Americans)and resurrection of their liberated identity also
comes to our mind. Pepita, the seed of future of African-Americans, will rise again when
the frost of the ignorance and indifference of African-American is lifted: hence the
symbol of hope for better time and space. She is also compared to a “robin,” the bird that
even sings in the dead of winter and looks ahead to coming spring. It may be wriggling
with pain at present, but her songs continue. Although it is “chopped” it instills optimism
into the listeners’ heart and soul for it is the harbinger of the spring that is not far away.
Thus, the poem ends with “chirping” of robin, the bird of hope.
If the readers analyze and explore “In the Mecca” in international context,
particularly context, they can extend Mrs. Sallie’s plight and the abject social and
economic conditions of the Meccans to those of their own underclasses and oppressed
sections of their community. “In the Mecca” apparently deals with the problems of
poverty, miseries, and multitude of constrictions that African Americans have to face and
struggle against gender and racial oppression. But, it has broader context, as Lowney
remarks: “the struggles defining Brooks' characters are confined neither temporally nor
spatially to their lives in the Mecca.” In the light of this statement, Pakistani students may
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look at the theme of loss of faith in space and systems that cannot provide security and
class mobility to its dwellers.
This poem describes the loss of faith in the system and space that its inhabitants,
especially Mrs. Sallie considers it a place of rest and sanctuary: “Mrs. Sallie hies home to
Mecca, hies to marvelous rest ;”(Black 405), but it turns out to be a inimical place that
resembles Nazi concentration camps or a prison. Freedom is excluded or is absent in this
vast structure, and its rotten and unwholesome atmosphere. A line like: “Sit where the
light corrupts your face.” (405) gives the impression of the hell or hades. Brooks,
through the narrator and characters, gives prophetic call for liberation—freedom from the
Mecca building, the symbol of oppression, exploitation and poverty, but she also make
them realize that it is not possible unless the inhabitants of the mecca dismantle it from
inside. Pakistani students can relate Brooks’ call to come out of spatial and temporal
confinement or restrictiveness of mind and vision and to fight against the ignorance and
indifference, to the prevalent social and political situation in Pakistan. They can draw
some parallels between the conditions of under classes of Pakistani society, particularly
those of women and the conditions of the Meccans. Then they will be able to comprehend
the plight of the down and out and sufferings of women in Pakistan better. They will also
understand that the prevalent social, political, and moral values need to be subverted.
However, the dismantling of the Mecca building, the symbol of white social and
cultural values is initiated by the murder of Pepita, a young African American girl, who
has the potential to become a poet, a woman with ‘ voice’ and vision if she were given an
opportunity to survive in a conducive milieu. Her disappearance and subsequent death
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shakes the walls of a Mecca building that has kept them away from the mainstream and,
physically and mentally confined them to its narrow spaces. According to S. H. Hughes,
“It is, then, her victimization that ultimately signals the necessity of freedom, her loss that
points to the meaning of her life, and her silence that signals the necessity of speech and
of poetry.” The narrator’s assertion: “She never went to kindergarten.”(Black 432) makes
the readers realize the need of education among African Americans, especially among
women. She further insists “She never learned that black is not beloved” (430). The
implied meaning of the lines is that Pepita never learns that African Americans are an
oppressed class, for she has never comes out of her mental and physical constraints. To
liberate her body and mind she must acquire knowledge and for that she as well as her
community needs to demolish the prison of western culture and values signified by
Mecca building.
Pakistani students can look at the message from their own context of the stories of
victimization of women in different areas of Pakistan in the form of the tribal courts
punishing them for the crime or sin that they have not committed, or forced marriage as a
retribution for the crime that the male members of their tribes or clans have committed, or
the victims of sexual abuse by powerful land owners. The majority of the women in
Pakistan is kept ignorant and is not allowed to be part of society at large because of social
taboos, and so-called religious injunctions. To see their way out of these restrictions and
inhibitions, they need education and knowledge of their rights and potentials. The call of
Pakistani feminists and the human rights activists to resist the victimization of women
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requires the acquisition of knowledge and voice so that Pakistani women and other
oppressed classes may articulate their feelings.
Pakistani students will be able to appreciate a poem such as "In the Mecca," if
they look at the building as a signifier of the restrictions, discrimination, and oppression
imposed on a community or people; it also represents the torpor and indifference of some
amongst the people to their abject conditions, they can relate it to the present social and
political situations as well as to the conditions of women in Pakistan. The majority of
Pakistani women and men are poor and illiterate and so are living, symbolically in a
Mecca building, without opportunity, under the fear of tyrannical political and religious
groups, , and confronting social, political, class, gender, and religious oppression.
Brooks’ “In the Mecca” can draw the attention of Pakistani students to Brooks’ message
that if they want liberation from such injustice, Pakistanis need to “damn”(Hughes) the
systems that constrain them from social and political freedom as well as the
transformation of identity.
Brooks’ poem may enhance the realization of Pakistani students that women and
men need to become aware of the power that allows groups to oppress and impose the
identity of their choice on women and other weaker sections of the society; Brooks leads
her readers to the realization that this power derives not from divine ordained laws, but
from man-made realities that can be transformed. She applies the Mecca building, a
dilapidated structure as the signifier of an obsolete system that needs to be dismantled
from within. In this way Pakistani students gain a cross-cultural vision of the systems
which make the women tongueless, as Kishwar Naheed has described it in her poem “We
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sinful women.” Like Brooks, Naheed writes on behalf of those “who find that tongues
which could speak have been severed”, the invisible members of the family and society.
When Pakistani students view Brooks’ “In the Mecca” in the context of Bakhtin’s ideas
of ‘word’ and “dialogism,” they will realize that Brooks’ poem is not only applicable to
the African Americans of late 1960s and early 1970s, but it is also true for Pakistan of
today. Pakistani students can look at the Mecca building as the signifier of those systems,
values and ideas that have delimited their vision, restricted their thoughts, denied them
their rightful opportunities for social and economic mobility, and deprived them of their
legal and civic rights. They can also comprehend that the identity and values imposed on
women by a male-dominated society and its power groups are transient and they can be
changed. Brooks provokes them to see that in Pakistan, both men and women will have
to dismantle the structure of social and moral norms that gives authority to oppressors to
impose their monologic truth on others.
Mrs. Sallie Smith’s search for her lost girl can also be understood in the context of
the classical tradition of the descent into the underworld by the heroic figure, particularly,
Dante's descent into Hell. Sheila Hughes has made a passing reference to Dante’s descent
into hell, in her article, “A Prophet Overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn
Brooks' ‘In the Mecca’,” when she states, “It draws together the remnants of Dante’s
descent into hell,” but she does not explain and elaborate her state. I have traced some
parallels between Dante’s hell and Brooks’ Mecca, and the purpose of Dante’s descent
into the hell and that of Mrs. Sallie’s and narrator’s journey through the Mecca building.
The journey of Mrs. Sallie Smith through the structure is described in the style that is
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usually adopted in the narrative of the quest. In such stories, particularly in Dante’s
“Inferno,” the poet adopts this narrative technique. The purpose of the descent into Hell is
the Journey undertaken to vindicate lost honor and dignity or to attain self-knowledge
and identity. The descent into Hell, or Hades, has been a recurrent theme in European
literature. In Virgil’s epic, “The Aeneid,” the hero, Aeneas, descends into the Hades to
speak with his ancestors, in order to gain wisdom and knowledge of the future. Robert
Hollander remarks that Virgil’s hero, Aeneas, after his journey into the underworld
becomes “a new Aeneas,” a changed person.
Dante is taken through the nine layers of Hell by the spirit of Virgil, who leads
him through the gates of Hell, marked by the haunting inscription “all hope abandon, you
who enter here” (Inferno, III.9), so that he may rise to heaven, where his Beatrice is. “In
the Mecca” opens with the narrator’s dark and haunting warning in blended Biblical
language and African-American vernacular: "Now the way of the Mecca was on this
wise." The narrator and Mrs. Sallie Smith lead us, the readers, through Mecca, and they
not only tell us, but also show us the woes, miseries, abject poverty, crimes and sins that
have given Mecca semblance of a Hell. The images of sickness, corruption, dirt, filth
decay and death in “In the Mecca” tell the reader that it is a rotten place with an
unwholesome environment, much like that of Dante’s Hell. The reader’s journey through
Mecca, in the company of the narrator and Mrs. Sallie Smith, helps them to understand
human nature better and enables them to feel the presence of evil and destructive powers
more acutely. After the search through the Mecca building for Pepita, Mrs. Sallie and the
narrator/brooks may not be the same. Mrs. Sallie, who hies home for rest,may not have
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the same faith in her place and people after the experiences that she has to undergo during
the search for lost daughter. The narrator/ Brooks who starts the narration with dark and
haunting warning, ends her narration with optimistic note and prophetic vision of “A
material collapse that is Construction.”(Black 432).
Dante has to descend into Hell so that he may rise to Paradise, where his Beatrice
lives: in other words, Dante must descend into the Hell, in order to understand the nature
of human evils and gains insight into human nature, and therefore his own. According to
John Freccero, Dante’s “Inferno, like Plato's cave, is a place where all men come to know
themselves” (168). Dante’s Hell is a description of the nature of punishments given to
sinners according to the intensity and grossness of their sins. In this way, Dante makes
his readers realize the intensity and potentiality of sins and evils present in human nature,
so that a nation, or a community, or individual men and women may peep into their souls
and understand their sins and the evil that they have to encounter and overcome, before
they can attain self-realization or self-knowledge.
The journey through Mecca in search of the lost child is also the quest for the
liberation and a new identity for African-Americans. But, they must gain the
consciousness of the evils and sins that are plaguing their community. The narrator, along
with Mrs. Sallie Smith, takes the readers to every cell and to every floor to acquaint them
with prevalent evils and crimes among the dwellers of this Hell-like structure. Dante
assigns different levels of Hell for different sins, according to their grossness and
intensity. The grosser the sin the deeper the level of Hell and the more severe the
punishment assigned to the sinner. Although Brooks has not demarcated the level or the
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grossness of sin and severity of the punishments, she, no doubt, makes the readers realize
the intensity of evil and sins that are pushing the community to indifference, hypocrisy,
and gender oppression. Brooks is exposing these sins with reference to inhabitants of the
Mecca, but they are not limited to the space and time of the building and its inhabitants
for they are the sins that are present in every region, age, and nation: hence they are
universal in nature. If Dante’s idea of the greatest sin is fraud or betrayal to one’s
benefactor, Brooks’ idea of the most deplorable crime is ignorance, which in turn leads to
poverty and indifference to the real problems of a community.
Brooks’ message in “In the Mecca” is political, but the means that she envisioned
to achieve the end is guided by “sanity,” which is characterized by the unification of
moral and aesthetic values in a piece of artistic creation. She uses the dilapidated and
sordid building, Mecca as a symbol to represent the social, moral, and political state of
affairs of African-American society. The narrator and Mrs. Sallie Smith serve as eyes and
ears for the readers, for they show the abject life and various social and moral sins of the
dwellers, tell their tales of sufferings and woe resulting from oppression and ignorance,
comment on their physical actions and psychological conditions, and make the readers
hear the sad music of agony and anguish that is reverberating throughout Mecca. The
main theme of Dante’s Inferno is the exposition of the perfection of God’s justice and
punishment for the crimes and sins that human beings have committed, but it also has
other themes, which relate to the social and political issues of Dante’s time. Ciacco, a
Florentine who Dante talks to in the Third Circle of Hell, makes a prediction of
Florence’s political future, which according to him will be filled with discord and
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dissension. Frank Rosengarten, in his article, “Gramsci's ‘Little Discovery’: Gramsci's
Interpretation of Canto X of Dante's Inferno,” draws our attention to the political
elements in the Canto X, which are brought out through the dialogue between Dante and
the shade of Farinata, Dante’s political opponent, when he was alive, as well as the theme
of punishment and endowment of “the gift of prophecy.”
Although the central idea of “In the Mecca” is the quest for the lost child, some
complex and important social, political, and moral theme are embedded in this poem, as
well. In “In the Mecca,” we find visions concerning the future of African-Americans. We
hear from the narrator what Don Lee wants in a powerful rhetoric. She tells the reader
that Lee’s vision is complete liberation. He wants a new earth, a new sky, a new anthem,
as well as new and powerful music for African-Americans. The narrator says that he
“wants a new nation . . . new art and anthem; will want a new music screaming in the
sun” (421-422). Another vision comes from Amos, who advocates violent change and
retaliation against what White America had done to the Black during the slavery days.
And Amos (not Alfred) prays, for America:
Bathe her in her beautiful blood.
A long blood bath will wash her pure. . .
Great-nailed boots must kick her prostrate,
heel-grind that soft breast, outrage her saucy pride,
remove her fair fine mask
. . . flogging her dark one with her own hand,
watching in meek amusement while he bled.
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Then shall she rise, recover.
Never to forget. (422-23)
At the beginning of Amos’s speech and a little later the narrator reiterates twice, “Amos
(not Alfred) says,” to make the reader realize that the vision is not of the narrator or that
of Alfred, but of Amos alone. In fact, this assertion makes the reader feel that the
narrator and Alfred do not approve Amos’s ideas of violence and bloodshed.
However, the narrator brings in Alfred for the fifth time and he describes his vision
of “essential sanity,” which will be “black and electric” and will light the path of
liberation. Alfred’s idea of “essential sanity” is related to moral vision in art and its
significance in society. It also includes the concept of beauty in its totality, i.e. beauty of
forms, objects, and actions. In fact, Alfred’s vision, an epiphanic moment, as Melhem has
pointed out, can be viewed as the sudden vision that the Romantic poets, like
Wordsworth, have experienced in an intense moment of powerful feeling. They attain
“the sense of continuity with nature through which human life perceives the universal
bond” (Melhem 166). In Wordsworth and in the works of other British Romantic poets,
such vision and experience arouse “intellectual love” (Melhem 166) for they merge their
imagination with Platonic idealism, but with Brooks, the stress is on mundane and dayto-day problems of survival in hostile and unfavorable conditions. Melhem remarks, “In
Brooks there is a similar emphasis on imagination as empathy, but the engagement is
more immediately applicable to daily life. In a destructive environment, she suggests,
black sanity will be curative, not by passive alienation but through a passionate
"estrangement" from prevailing values” (Melhem 166). Brooks has already demonstrated
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in her Novel, Maud Martha (1953) through her heroin, Maud, that violence and
alienation are not the only means to Register one’s protest or disapproval of a system, one
can also shows one’s anger, hatred, disapproval by not becoming a part of that system.
Alfred recurrent appearance in the poem indicates the development of his consciousness.
In the beginning, he is more concerned with problems and issues that are not related to
the immediate problems being faced by his neighbors; rather he is more interested in the
works of Browning, Narula, and Singh. But, toward the end of the poem, he talks about
“essential sanity that is black and electric. However, he does not advocate violence like
Amos or demands new nation or new anthem like Don Lee, what he envisions, is the
material collapse and coming out of the confinement symbolized by The Mecca building:
I hate it.
Yet, murmurs Alfred—
who is lean at the balcony, leaning—
something, something in Mecca
continues to call! Substanceless; yet like mountains,
like rivers and oceans too; and like trees
with wind whistling through them. And steadily
an essential sanity, black and electric,
builds to a reportage and redemption.
A hot estrangement.
A material collapse that is Construction.” (Blacks 432)
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Alfred’s vision of “the essential sanity” is the maturing of the sanity that we find in
“Maud Martha”: and Maud breaking away from restrictive choices and confined places
and coming out into open places and the real light of the sun, as well as merging into
mainstream social and political life.
The center of Brooks’ vision seems to be the collapse of the structure of Mecca, a
symbol of both restriction and confinement and the rise of African-American
consciousness based on “essential sanity.” The death of Pepita and her leaving of Mecca
mark the beginning of the collapse of Mecca, which is painted as a prison. The
apartments and rooms of Mecca have been described as prison cells in which the AfricanAmericans have confined themselves or imprisoned by the predominant systems.
Freedom and cheerful bright light seem to be absent from this urban tenement. The sense
of lack of freedom and the gloomy depressing atmosphere make this building resemble
Hell. But, the difference between Mecca and Hell is that Mecca, the symbol of restrictive
life and choice, is a crumbling structure and its rupture has already begun. Its inhabitant
can hope for better days whereas, the inhabitants of Dante’s Hell have no hope of
escaping from their punishment and confinement.
The death of Pepita signifies the need for African-American society to reconfigure
and re-imagine a new identity and new consciousness. The journey through this Hell-like
building reminds the readers of the traditional theme of the journey downward in order to
rise as Freccero has pointed out with reference to Augustine, Aristotle, and Dante in his
article, “Dante’s Pilgrim in a Jyre,” “this is the literal justification of the moral truth
which Augustine expressed with the exhortation: ‘Descend, so that you may ascend. In
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spiritual life, one must descend in humility before one can begin the ascent to truth, and
in the physical world, according to both Dante and Aristotle, one must travel downward
with respect to our hemisphere in order to rise’”(170). This downward journey or journey
into man’s inner self ultimately leads the protagonist, as well as the reader to the
attainment of self-knowledge or self-affirmation. The search party of Mrs. Sallie Smith
leads the readers into heart of the darkness of African-American material, psychological,
and spiritual wilderness, and it gives insight into the existence of evil in human nature
and the destruction it can cause to an individual, as well as to a society. This journey
through the restrictive, mundane, and squalid world of poor and oppressed people shown
an described by two women, a poor mother and the omniscient narrator, acquaints the
audience with not only material deprivation and comfort, but also the lack of fellow
feeling among African-Americans. Thus she exposes the weaknesses in African society
that need to be overcome before reconfiguring an alternative system for themselves. This
journey through Mecca also is journey conducted by a suffering mother into the inner
recesses of the African- American psyche, and it helps her African-American as well as
the larger audience to understand their weaknesses and sins such as, greed, lust,
hypocrisy, torpor, indifference to the sufferings and problems. This consciousness and
self-knowledge will enable them to transform their given identity and social and political
status.
Brooks, who has been talking from the margin about blackness and AfricanAmerican’s problems and issues for 23 years, finally descends into the center of AfricanAmerican life, Mecca, in order to gain self-knowledge. With the attainment of self-
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knowledge and knowledge of her people, brooks realizes that what her people need is,
“essential sanity,” that will empower them to destabilize the old value systems based on
white values, as well as to liberate African-Americans from their confined atmosphere
and narrow visions. This reconfiguration of a new values, Brooks seems to suggest,
should be based on: “. . . . An essential sanity, black and electric, builds to a reportage
and redemption” (Black 431).
Brooks’ poetry is not appreciated in its complete perspective by both the white and
black critics. Euro-American-centric critics of late 1960s and early 1970s, and even her
biographer George Kent, believe that Brooks poetry before the second Fisk University
Black Writer’s Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, 1967 is better in aesthetic and
literary quality compared to her poetry after what is popularly known among Brooks’
critics as her ‘rebirth of consciousness.’ On the other hand, some radical younger poets of
the Black Art movement consider that her early poetry is aimed at a white middle class
audience. But, her works, whether they belong to before or after 1967, always address
questions of poverty, the social issues of the down and out of African American society,
and the oppression of woman. There is no major shift in the themes and subject matter of
her poetry. The poetry written before 1967, “with its intense experimentation in
traditional poetic forms” (Annette Debo 143) is appreciated by the main stream critics for
its aesthetic and lyrical qualities, but, her later poetry which does not conform to the
elitist literary canons is disapproved on the pretext that they lack aesthetic quality and
universality.
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“In the Mecca” has proved that these observations and objections are not based on
the impartial judgment. “In the Mecca” is rich in aestheticism, for Brooks infuses black
aesthetics into the conventional aesthetic values, thus she not only destabilizes the
traditional notions of aestheticism, but also reconfigures it in the perspective of larger and
broader human values. We can look at the Anglo-American--centric criticism against
Brooks’ later poetry as the question that the African-American writers had to confront
after 1967, whether a poet should write in traditional form and diction which are
acceptable to mainstream Euro-American literary canons, or in open form and vernacular
language that African-American writers and critics appreciate. However, now it is the
other way around, for dominant position would be that black writers ought to draw upon
folk and vernacular culture and language. Perhaps the tables have termed. This would
explain why the most anthologized of all Brook’s poems is not a sonnet, but “We Real
Cool” with its urban setting and use of simulated vernacular English. Critics like Sheila
Hassell Hughes believe “In the Mecca” marks the end of one literary period for the poet
and the beginning of another, but, in my opinion, there is no early, middle, or last age in
Brooks’ poetry, and there is no major shift in the themes and subject matter of her,
because subversion, struggle, protest, satire, irony, and experimentation of literary forms,
as well as aesthetic quality have always been prominent features of her writing.
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CHAPTER V
MAUD MARTHA: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN’S ATTAINMENT OF VOICE
Maud Martha, (1953) Brooks’ sole novel, enhances the themes of resistance,
protest, subversion, and the “Black-and-tan motif” as well as aspiration for the social and
class mobility that we find in her first two volumes of poetry, “A Street in Bronzeville”
(1945) and “Annie Allen” (1949). It also heralds the idea of “sanity,” which she enhances
in her longest poem, “In the Mecca” (1968). Brooks adopts a different genre in Maud
Martha: the novel, but her style and technique is poetic. While the genre is different, the
themes and subject matters are not. Maud Martha is the story of an African-American
woman’s growth from girlhood to womanhood and motherhood. It can also be viewed as
the progression of consciousness in and attainment of voice by the protagonist. Both
these merits are essential for an African-American woman to transform herself and to
articulate her emotions, feelings, anger and protests. Maud is aware of discrimination in
society, injustice perpetrated against African-Americans, oppression of black women, and
the social and economic factors that are obstructing the class mobility among the African
Americans, particularly African American women, but she lacks the ability to voice her
anger and protests, until she becomes a mother and her daughter’s happiness and
childhood are at stake. Her act of resistance and protest against racism and sexism
demonstrates her insight into the nature of these problems and manners of countering
them. Her extraordinary vision and approach to these problems, as well as the method she
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adopts to challenge discrimination and injustice is immediately recognized as uncommon
attributes by the reader.
The name of the protagonist, Maud Martha, suggests conflict in the mind of the
Maud. Maud grows up a docile and submissive girl, who apparently accepts her predefined role, and this aspect of her nature is reflected by the first part of her name,
Maud—which comes, as Melhem has points out, from the New Testament, "Magdalene,"
the adulteress who became a devout Christian after conversion. The ambivalence in the
name also reminds the readers of Tennyson's "Maud," grappling with passion and duty”
(Melhem 86). The second part of her name, Martha represents her aggressive nature, for
“Martha” according to Melhem, in the New Testament is a warrior. Thus the name of the
protagonist, reflects conflict between the ‘Maud’ who seems to accept color stratification
in her early days and the ‘Martha’ who is always ready to challenge and fight against
color and racial discrimination as well as injustice. According to Melhem, “Collocation
of the names ‘Maud’ and ‘Martha,’ therefore, suggests the conflict between self-assertion
and self-restraint.” She carries this conflict from her previous two poetic volumes and
continues it in her epic poem “In the Mecca”. Her vision in this novel and in “In the
Mecca” is that to gain liberation guided by “essential sanity” African-Americans must
attain self-knowledge and self-definition, for which they must simultaneously exercise
“self-assertion” and self restraint.
Another theme that she continues from her previous volume of poetry, Annie
Allen, is the act of looking for alternative systems through the figure of the ‘mother.’
“Annie Allen” narrates the growth of a African-American woman, from childhood to
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motherhood. The ultimate change that comes to Annie, in this tale, seems come about
abruptly. However, in Maud Martha, Brooks gives an elaborate description of the
changes that have taken place in the life of Maud, and it traces the gradual rise of
consciousness and progress to her attainment of voice. We can discern the transitions in
Maud from girlhood to womanhood, to married life and to pregnancy, child birth, and
finally motherhood. These changes in her are not only the changes in her physical and
biological conditions, but also in her mental, psychological, and emotional situations. It is
during maternity and motherhood, that Maud gains self-realization and empathy, for all
creatures. She cherishes values such as, love, restraint, self-affirmation, defiance and
resistance with grace and dignity. These values, Melhem calls “sanity” (87). It is this
“sanity,” which later becomes the “essential sanity” that is “Black and electric” in “In the
Mecca.” The light of sanity that we see in “Maud Martha” is dim, but it is harbinger of
the bright light of African-American consciousness (Black consciousness) that will come
later in her works.
“Maud Martha” is a black bildungsroman, which narrates the story of Maud
Martha, a simple, plain, timid black girl who grows up accepting woman’s defined and
prescribed roles, as well as race discrimination. However, the section that deals with her
young womanhood and married life narrates her struggle to establish her identity and to
find a voice, which will enable her to register her existence and articulate her aspirations
and dreams. Later, when she becomes a mother, she not only asserts authority but also
challenges the values and culture that render black African-American women invisible to
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the rest of society. Her role as a mother turns her into a rebellious individual, who
righteously resists and protests against all forms of dominations and discriminations.
This poetic novel, like most of her early poems, gives a central role to a common
African-American woman. This act is unusual for the time, because the 1940s-50s was an
age of powerful male characters, like Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas and Ralph
Ellison’s invisible man. This novel traces the growth of Maud’s mind, along with
descriptions of her journey from girlhood to motherhood. The reader is more familiar
with the functioning of her mind and the development of her thoughts than her physical
appearance. Brooks’ description of Maud Martha Brown begins with an explanation of
Maud’s passion for a common flower, a dandelion. She is conscious of her black
complexion and is acutely aware of how others feel about her race and color. We do not
find much direct action in the novel, except in a few places, particularly toward the end of
the novel. It enables the readers to follow and understand the development of her
consciousness that ultimately renders her voice. A sympathetic third-person narrator
describes most of the actions that are taking place in Maud's mind. We look at and
understand Maud’s character through the narrator who can be intrusive as well as
objective at the same time. Brooks, in her later works, applies this narrative device,
particularly in “In the Mecca”. In Maud Martha the main voice is the “undramatized
narrator, the fictional self” (R. Baxter Miller) who can penetrate into the consciousness of
the characters and can also maintain a distance from them.
The narrator, who seems to be more interested in the working of Maud’s mind than
in her physical actions tells the readers in the novel's opening chapter how Maud
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cherishes plain things such as the dandelions in her parent's backyard and identify them
as “a picture of herself” for their “demure prettiness” and “everydayness” (Blacks 144).
Yet, the reader is made aware that while Maud’s aesthetic tastes and physical appearance
may be simple and ordinary, her mind and thought are quite complex. She is a poet by
temperament and is capable of understanding other’s emotions and is aware that every
person cannot have the same aesthetic appreciation of the "commonplace." She struggles,
resists and protests against injustice, discrimination, and oppression without loosing grace
and dignity. She is a new African-American woman, who is conscious of her dignity and
at the same time, knows how to snatch her rights from reluctant hands for herself and her
daughter, through positive means i.e. without losing grace and dignity. Over and above
all, she has developed the consciousness that she is “a human being” with self-respect
and an independent identity. She is a common and plain-looking girl in outward
appearance, but her power to verbally articulate her thoughts and feelings links her with
the struggles and aspirations of African-American women of the last three decades of the
20th century.
Maud is a type of African-American woman that Brooks wants to help bring into
being in African-American society through the influence of her works. Brooks seems to
be giving a guide line to African-American women of how to defy and resist the
discrimination and injustice through Maud’s approach to life and her method of protest
and resistance against the prevalent evils in the society. We can trace Maud’s resistance
in three levels: in the first level, although she feels the color stratification, in her family,
as well as in her society, she does not externalize her anger and resentment; in the second
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level, she registers her protest and resistance by refusing to become a part of the system
that reduces African American women to invisible objects or a mindless child; and in the
third level, she finds voice and articulates her rage and powerfully demands the rights of
her daughter. Her resistance and struggle are not only against white culture and values,
but also against her own color conscious and sexist society. Till her marriage, we do not
find any extraordinary quality that distinguishes her from other black women in physical
actions or mental qualities except that she likes common and ordinary flowers, like
dandelions, and that she prefers reading books to going to parties. But, after marriage,
we, with the help of the narrator who is tracing the changes in her feelings and
consciousness, can observe some changes in her character. She is not satisfied with the
identity that is given to her by society and her husband, Paul. She constantly feels that she
is not given due recognition, because of her color and gender. She even feels that her
husband, who prefers light color skin, is incapable of appreciating her beauty and the
higher qualities that she possesses.
This novel takes up the theme of “black-and-tan theme” (Davis) that we find in
the “Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie,” the “Ballad of Pearl May Lee,” and “Annie Allen”
and develop it further. Light color skin, the standard of beauty in white culture, which is
adopted by African-Americans of every complexion, as well as both genders
continuously, disturbs Maud, as well as Brooks, herself. Brooks brings up this issue time
and again in her early works, and she exposes its baneful effects on the life of darkercomplexioned African-American women. However, we usually find a message that black
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and dark color women should create a new value system and new criteria of beauty for
themselves.
Maud is aware of the supposed ugliness of her color, as well as the racial
discrimination against it. She has experienced this color discrimination since her
childhood, not only in the outside world but also at home. Her parents and brother prefer
her sister, Helen because of her fair color and golden hair. At school, she is rejected or
ignored by her male counterparts for her black color. Emmanuel refuses to give her a ride
in his wagon, because of her color and remarks, “I don't mean you, you old black
gal"(Black 176). This experience of color discrimination among African-Americans
weighed heavily on her mind and feels it more sharply when Paul, her husband neglects
her in the ball of the Foxy cats club. Melhem remarks, “But the black-and- tan dilemma
more cruelly afflicts Maud at the Annual Dawn Ball of the Foxy Cats Club, a group of
pleasure-seekers” (89). Maud realizes that her husband, Paul does not like her and cannot
appreciate her merits because he is judging her with standards set by white culture. She
also knows that due to her dark complexion and pregnancy, she is an unimpressive and
unattractive figure among the revelers. Paul also neglects her, seats her on a bench and
goes to dance with a fair skinned girl. Maud, watching Paul dance with the red-hair
Maella, realizes that her color will always be "like a wall. He has to jump over it in order
to meet and touch what I've got for him. . . . He gets awful tired of all that Jumping"
(Black 229-230). Paul’s attitude and her consciousness of her black color, constantly
disturbs her and, at times, the reader may feel that she succumbs to traditional white idea
of beauty. However, she, like Mabbie in “The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie,” realizes that
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she has to rely on her own resources and reconstruct her self-identity, in order to struggle
against the racist and sexist society. Maud is pragmatic in her approach, she neither
romanticizes her dark color like the Harlem Renaissance writers, nor shouts like the
Black Arts movement, “Black is beautiful”; rather, she realistically faces her
psychological and social problems and tries to overcome them with grace and dignity.
Maud is angry with her society for their standards of beauty, which are based on
the criteria of white culture. For many black men of that time, “Pretty would be a little
cream-colored thing with curly hair” (Black 195). She does not react violently or behave
improperly despite the fact that she is choking with anger for the color discrimination that
she has to face everywhere. She knows that Paul does not love her, as he would love a
wife with light color. But she continues to love him and tries to understand the social,
psychological, and emotional problems that compel him to behave the way he does.
When, at the Foxy Cats Club dance, Paul leaves her to dance with someone “red-haired
and curved, and white as a white,” (Black 227), Maud realizes Paul is abandoning her
because of her color but, she does not condemn or censure her husband for what she
considers his weaknesses. She understands that to have good relations between them they
should accommodate and understand each other. In the Foxy Cat Club dance, Maud
watches her husband dancing with a beautiful light skin woman. She is so enraged by the
sight that she wants to scratch, spit at, and scream at Paul's dance partner, but she checks
herself and does not yield to her anger and jealousy. “Maud seems to realize that she will
never have the opportunity to defy the gods and mountains responsible for her
oppression, so she, like Paul, will simply keep jumping at the wall” (Lattin and Lattin).
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She can also feel the high barrier of racial discrimination in her society and wants
to break that barrier and come out into the open. She wants to become a part of the larger
world, not confined to small spaces and a limited circle: “Maud Martha, with her
daughter, got out-of-doors. She did not need information, or solace, or a guidebook, or a
sermon—not in this sun!—not in this blue air!” (Black 320). Maud is a changed woman-she is ready to face every challenge by herself and has transcended spatial, as well as
mental and psychological limitations. At the same time, she seems to have resolved to
coexist in American society, but in a different environment—in the atmosphere of
freedom and openness.
Brooks, in her early two volumes uses images of “bad woman,” in poems such as
“Sadie and Maud,” "a song in the front yard," and "the rites for Cousin Vit," to
destabilize and subvert conventional moral values and to reconfigure a new image and
new values, which render African-American women recognition as human beings.
However, in “Maud Martha,” Brooks, through the image of Maud and her struggle as a
married woman and as a mother, seems to be giving a new set of moral and social values,
which are essentially African-American and necessary for the change in social and
economic life. Brooks/the narrator is suggesting that an ideal of new African-American
woman is in possession of a powerful individual ‘voice.’ Maud chooses to live with
dignity, resist with grace, and make her life as meaningful and beautiful as possible. She
upholds the moral and social values that Brooks has, directly or indirectly, advocated in
her first two books—the moral vision of Mrs. Booker T, social awareness of Big Bessie,
and Annie’s ideas of civilized space.
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Brooks and Maud, the heroine of her autobiographical novel, are struggling to
overcome the invisibility that has been imposed on African-American women by white
culture. Maud has to suffer discrimination from within the African-American community,
but she also has some bitter experiences of racial segregation and discrimination in her
wider social life. During a visit to movie theater, the “World Playhouse,” Maud’s
girlhood fear of the white world, which she sees as “always hunched and ready to close in
on you....” (Black 151) resurfaces—she feels shaky, nervous, and afraid in the presence
of the cold and indifferent white audience, who does not acknowledge their presence and
treats Maud and her husband as they are invisible. Brooks and her women, particularly,
the mother figures, are struggling and raising voices of protest against the invisibility of
African-American women. Maud’s effort to establish and assert her identity as a
dignified and respectable woman with a liberated voice, is meant to lift her out of the
invisibility that racial, color, and gender discrimination has imposed on her.
Maud is simple, but not naive; she has an intense awareness of social, economic,
and racial problems. She tackles and solves them in her own way. Her intelligent and
active mind is always in search of means and ways of asserting her identity and
challenging oppressive racist and sexist practices as well as to climb the social and
economic ladders. She is conscious of the prevalent problems in her society, particularly
those problems that black African-American women have to face in their day-to-day
lives.
Maud actions and interior monologues as well as the narrator’s comments provide
the reader an opportunity to peep into the mind of a woman who is struggling against
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racism and sexism which are responsible for the denigration of African-American women
and the impediment of their class mobility and economic improvement. Her ideas and
manner of thinking are blatantly unconventional for her time. Maud wants to have an
identity of her own and desires an environment in which she may be able to lead a life in
which her hopes and ambitions may come into fruition. Maud believes that life should be
creative. She understands the implications of racism and injustice. She also knows that
they can stunt “her ability to exist in a creative fashion” (Lattin and Lattin). Creativity in
life needs self-affirmation and self-realization, as well as an independent identity. This
desire and awareness urge her to resist racism and sexism so that she may create for
African American women, at least for herself, a milieu in which African American
children may live a free life, sans racial and color barriers, look forward to a future in
which Paulette's (African American) children will not have to lose their childhood
dreams and fancies, and look at life hopefully. She realizes that the best way to achieve
this end is to defy and resist the system that has rendered her, and other women with dark
complexions, invisible. She expresses her disapproval, anger, and resentment, as strongly
as she can, without losing her dignity and moral values.
Her idea of living in a “creative fashion” is meant to give life positive and hopeful
views and to create life out of death and destruction. Her action of freeing the entrapped
mouse that has been dodging her for many days and granting it life is a creative act and
reveals that Maud is empathetic and can understand other’s feelings. Her action of freeing
the mouse out of sympathy and fellow feelings gives a glimpse of her self-realization,
which will lead her to self-definition and self-affirmation. Maud finally traps the mouse
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that has been giving her the slip for days, but after the capture, she begins to empathize
with the captive, thinking that he/she may have a family and that he/she is anxious about
his/her children and perhaps feeling sorry that she/he will miss the pleasures of his/her
family. The love for this fellow creature, empathy, and fellow feeling overwhelm her, and
she lets the mouse go.
At this point, Maud suddenly realizes her potential and “sees that she has the
power to preserve or destroy” (Lattin and Lattin). She chooses the positive and creative
power, i.e. to preserve the life of the mouse. She now understands that her action should
not be subservient to the circumstances, but that she can create value and meaning which
will make her actions creative and positive, in her own way. Patricia H. Lattin and
Vernon E. Lattin remark, “Through her simple restraint, she had created a piece of life.
By letting the creature go, she has been not only an artist/creator, but also a moral good.
Uniting art and morality, she sees herself as having a godlike loving-kindness”(184).
Maud’s action reflects Brooks’ idea that even small and insignificant actions of our
everyday existence can give meaning and beauty to our lives. In this incidence, Brooks is
trying to bring home to her audience that one does not need to move heaven and earth to
create something good, an act based on sanity, i. e. merger of art and morality, can bring
about a desired result—violence is not the only solution or the only means to achieve
one’s goal, one can adopt more constructive and positive means to destabilize oppressive
and unjust systems. The final message from Maud to the readers is to create a world
where the most insignificant and meanest flower even has a respectable place and that
people of different race and color may coexist in it, without denigration.
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Maud’s struggle is to create an independent identity on her own and to empower
herself by transforming the image and role of African American women. She is conscious
of the fact that to achieve her goal, she has to defy and oppose the preexisting systems,
and it could be possible only if she has the voice to articulate her feelings. As soon as she
finds a ‘voice,’ she feels empowered and ready to face and challenge predominant ideas.
With this newly attained ‘voice,’ she has the necessary sense of independent identity,
while still remaining an integral part of the society at large. Her vision of life is not
isolation, but coexistence under the free sky and with a new anthem.
She is a dynamic character; her ideas and thinking grow and mature with the
passage of time. Her vision of life broadens as her contact and experiences with other
people increases. She finally realizes that she must come out of her confined space and
narrow ideas; she must demolish the wall that has kept her out of the wider world, and
conquer the white racial mountain. The last vignette of Maud Martha, "back from the
wars!" provides insight into the changes that have come in Maud’s vision of life. After
under going diverse experiences of race, color, and gender discrimination, she has finally
reached at the conclusion that life has to be lived with grace and dignity, despite its ugly
and unpleasant factors. Although, the war in Europe and the Pacific has ended and life
seems to be filled with joy, because of the reunion of the members of the separated
families, it is not all optimism for African Americans, as she is aware that AfricanAmericans have to continue the war at home—war against racism and sexism, and war
for equality and social justice. She notices that some struggle and fighting against
oppression are continuing. She seems to have accepted life as it is, after going through
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both pleasant and bitter experiences, for she has realized that whatever may happen, life
will go on. Maud observes that life and death, beauty and ugliness, and good and evil are
integral parts of life, and they are placed side by side. "And the Negro press (on whose
front pages beamed the usual representations of womanly Beauty, pale and pompadour)
carried the stories of the latest of the Georgia and Mississippi lynchings. . ." (Black 321).
The juxtaposing of the pictures of beautiful women and those of the victims of racial
violence suggests that all the wars are not yet over for African-Americans. They have to
fight for freedom and struggle against oppression and restrictions, in the same way that
African-American women have to fight against the criteria of beauty defined by white
culture and wage the war against male domination and sexism.
Maud Martha’s struggle is a struggle against injustice against African-Americans,
racial discrimination and segregation, as well as color prejudice. In the beginning, we feel
that she accepted color stratification, but she has never approved discrimination based on
color, for she tries to resist color discrimination at every possible level. Later, when she
has to encounter racial discrimination her reaction at first is silent, but visible and strong
defiance. Before she can verbally articulate her anger and protest against racial and color
discrimination, she suffers a number of setbacks in her life, due to her race and shade.
She resists discrimination and injustice, at first silently, then through gestures and in the
end verbally, but throughout her defiance and protest, she does not lose poise in her
behavior; rather she always maintains dignity and grace.
She is optimistic of the coming days. She knows that as the winter has passed,
spring has come, and bleak days have changed into bright sunny days. So will the days of
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African-Americans change. Her hope lies in the fact that man's foolishness cannot
destroy even "the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower: for would its kind
not come up again in the spring? Come up, if necessary, among, between, or out of—
beastly inconvenient!—the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush
infallible and sincere" (Black 321). Maud may have the optimistic vision of life and look
forward to better days, but her optimism is not a shallow optimism. She is not oblivious
of the ugly and unpleasant realities of life. She knows that she has to fight against the
discrimination and oppression and has to win the fight, but she wants to do it in a
dignified way. She defies the racial discrimination of the white manager of the Millenary
shop by refusing to become her customer and protests against the racism of BurnsCoopers by giving up a well paid job. In both the cases, she maintains her dignity and at
the same time makes her adversaries feel her anger and resentment against their unjust
and discriminatory treatment.
Maud has positive vision of life. The imagery and language used by the narrator
and in Maud’s interior monologues in the novel, particularly in the later half of it, reflects
Maud’s positive vision and her confidence in her self. From her school days, the narrator
gives the impression that Maud has the habit of looking at things from a positive angle.
She believes that even a bleak day has some promises and one can hope for a better one.
The images, like the sun and the children in the chapter "spring landscape”: “The sky was
gray, but the sun was making little silver promises somewhere up there, hinting” (Black
146). Such an attitude toward life enables Maud to shut out all the world's inhibitions and
absurdities. Maud’s ability to appreciate the beauty of common flower, like the
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dandelion, and see “little promises, just under cover,” (Black 146) even in a bleak
situation enables Maud to end the story on a note of optimism and promise:
And was not this something to be thankful for?
And, in the meantime, while people did live they
would be grand, would be glorious and brave,
would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat.
They would even get up nonsense, through wars,
through divorce, through evictions and jiltings and
taxes. And, in the meantime, she was going to have
another baby. The weather was bidding her bon
voyage. (Black 321-22)
The remarks, “The weather was bidding her bon voyage” gives the sense of moving
forward dauntlessly and sailing to the new land of opportunities where there will be no
class and color discrimination, social and economic constrictions, and restrictions on a
particular community for its race and color. Brooks continues this vision and enhances
further in “In the Mecca,” in which she talks of the “material collapse” and creation of
the world, in which “essential sanity” prevails, and will be “black and electric.”
Maud is an organic character, and her personality and ideas grow with the change
in time and circumstances. These changes in her ideas and personalities also indicate
Maud’s gradual shifting toward attainment of authority and voice. There are four
incidences that demonstrate growth in her mental and psychological stature. All these
incidences are racial encounters and lead Maud to the attainment of voice to articulate her
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consciousness, which is expressed in the form of rage against Santa’s slight to her
daughter.
Maud is proud of her race and color, although we sometimes feel that she is not
happy with her blackness. Her self-respect and pride in her color and race come to
surface when a young white woman comes into Sonia Johnson's beauty shop to sell
lipstick. Sonia listens to her eulogies about the product and finally orders some of them.
Maud, who is in the shop at the time, is furious with Sonia’s response and the sales
woman’s remarks. Maud was watching Sonia intently—how she would use the
opportunity that she had got to humiliate a white person. Sonia did not use the
opportunity for a small victory over this young white woman, with what Maud thinks of
as "beautiful legs." Maud is aware of the attitude of some beauticians, who will not miss
any opportunity to humiliate the white saleswomen, whenever they come to sell their
products. They are, sometimes insulting, rude, and then they "applied the whiplash."
"Then they sent the poor creatures off—with no orders. Then they laughed and laughed
and laughed a terrible laughter" (Black 278). Maud is angry, because the saleswoman is
trying to sell the product to Sonia, convincing her that "this new shade . . . is just the
thing for your customers. For their dark complexions" (Black 278). Maud is annoyed by
the ignorance of the saleswoman, whom she doubts realizes that the "Negro group"
included all complexions ranging from very fair, sometime fairer than the white
saleswoman herself, to "brown, tan, yellow, cream which could not take a dark lipstick
and keep their poise" (Black 279). However, these are the secondary reasons for Maud’s
anger, Maud is furious, because the saleswoman has used the word "nigger" and has not
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been reprimanded by Sonia. The saleswoman has said, "I work like a nigger to make a
few pennies" (Black 281). Here, Sonia could have asserted her superiority by rebuking
the saleswoman, yet she does not do so.
No doubt, Maud is furious, but she is not ready to unleash her fury. She does not
want to pick up a row with the saleswoman, because she thinks it is not the right moment
to do so, or, perhaps, she has not yet found her voice with which to articulate her anger
and resentment. Maud does not utter a word against the white saleswoman or express her
anger verbally, but the omniscient narrator, who can penetrate into the minds of the
characters, externalizes the conflict in the mind of Maud as well as her anger. In fact, in
this novel, brooks, has developed a narrative technique by, as Miller remarks, “creating
an undramatized narrator, the fictional self conceived in the work, who can enter
characters' minds or withdraw into objectivity” (161). She also uses this narrative device
in her epic poem, “In the Mecca” to expose the evil, miseries of African Americans, and
oppression that are rampant in the Mecca building. In a later incidence, she does not miss
the opportunity to register her disapproval of the behavior of a white manager of the
Millenary shop, not verbally, but through her actions and behavior. She cuts the white
saleswoman to her size who is trying to slight her by ignoring her beauty, thus making
her invisible, while praising the virtues of the hat that she wants to sell to Maud. She
refuses to buy it although she is given a reasonable discount. Maud’s refusal to buy the
hat demonstrates her sense of self-respect.
In the vignette, "at the Burns-Coopers,'" we find Maud shattering the old image of
black women. Maud Martha asserts herself and proves that she is human being, who has
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self-respect and self-dignity. Economic difficulties force Maud Martha to accept a job as
a maid. Mrs. Burns-Cooper treats Maud as an ignorant mindless person, who does not
know anything about her work. The description of domestic tasks that Mrs. Burns-Cooper
assigns to Maud Martha brings out the constricting nature of such tasks. The employer is
severe in her dealing with Maud and wants to impose rigorous discipline on her. At this
moment, Maud understands the humiliation and indignity that Paul must have
experienced at his work, everyday. His employer must have also been officious and
dominating and may have tried to treat him as someone with no awareness, incapable of
performing his duties without being treated as an ignorant child. With her own experience
of indignity and humiliation, she begins to empathize with Paul. With this realization, she
decides not to return to Burns-Coopers. “In a positive act of refusal, confirming that of
‘millinery,’ Maud decides not to return” (Melhem 91).The decision not to return to her
work, reveals Maud’s development from registering her anger and protest only in her
thoughts or by body language to the strong physical action of refusing to work for an
employer who does not treat the employee with dignity that is due to every human being.
Melhem remarks, “She asserts her humanity: one was a human being." She has
progressed from acceptance of color stratifications—in family, school, marriage, and
society—to rebellion” (91). Maud has changed from a demur and shy black young
woman to a bold, self-asserting and confident woman, who is ready to fight for her rights.
The narrator’s comments and description enable the readers to keep themselves abreast of
the growth in Maud’s consciousness that ultimately leads her to the attainment of voice.
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The narrator has been leading the readers through different vignettes which give
insight into the working of Maud’s mind and consciousness. She is preparing them for
the explosion of Maud’s anger that marks Maud’s attainment of voice. Maud finally
attains ‘voice’ when she feels that she has to fight for her daughter’s right. So far Maud
has been resisting the indignities, discriminations, and humiliations through actions and
gestures. She has not yet verbally articulated her anger and resentment. However, when
Santa, in the rejection of her blackness, slights and ignores her daughter Paulette, as she
tries to tell Santa what she wants for Christmas, Maud finds her voice, asserts her
presence and forces the Santa to hear her daughter's request: "Mister," said Maud Martha,
"my little girl is talking to you" (Black 315). When Maud addresses the Santa as
“Mister,” she has removed the super-human aura of a genial old man reaching every
house without discriminating race and color, to deliver Christmas gifts to children on the
Christmas eve and reduces him to an ordinary human being with racial and color
prejudice. In this way, she exposes the hypocrisy of Santa a symbol of Christmas joys
and satirizes his action. In the past, Maud Martha has not articulated her rage, but with
her daughter's happiness at stake, she does not hesitate to speak up in a clear and
uncompromising statement that forces Santa to recognize, although reluctantly, Paulette’s
presence. Maud has compelled the Santa to give her daughter her rights. This experience
spurs the realization that she has a responsibility to save her daughter’s childhood
illusions and fancies. Her powerful protest against the Santa’s racial discrimination is
what Annie calls “to civilize the space”. Maud realizes that for daughter’s happiness, she
has to fight against the system. She does not want to destroy her daughter’s childhood
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fancies and joys by pre-mature awareness and knowledge of racial discrimination. She
tries to answer Paulette's matter of facts questions regarding Santa's cold treatment, while
minimizing the insult and assuring the child that Santa's affection will be proved when
her demands are fulfilled on Christmas morning. Her long explanation of Santa’s
behavior is her longest speech in the novel and an eloquent and pivotal display of her
passionate disapproval off the racial discrimination that could destroy her daughter’s
childhood pleasures.
In Maud Martha, Brooks delineates a woman, who may be viewed as an early
image of the new African-American women. She may be considered a predecessor of
black feminists of the 1970s-80s. In her early two volumes of poetry, we find women
who can articulate, like Pearl May Lee and Annie Allen, but their voices lack the vigor
and dramatic address that we find in Maud’s address to Santa. Moreover, Brooks traces
the development of Maud’s mind clearly and gives the reader clear ideas of her progress,
from a quiet young woman to a woman with a powerful voice and vision of the future.
We find Maud expressing her anger and resentment for the white saleswoman in her
interior monologue and displaying her disapproval of the sales woman by closing the
door on her. When she encounters Mrs. Burns-Cooper, who has been boasting about her
wealth and visits to various countries, she wants to tell her of her own experience, but
fails to articulate them. In both cases, we realize that Maud longs to rebuke them, but
cannot find the voice to do so. In the latter case, Maud, cannot even inform Mrs. BurnsCooper that she will be quitting the job. Maud lodges her protest by refusing to go to
work the next day. She cannot articulate her feelings and thoughts. Instead she listens to
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others tell her who she is, what she should do, and what is best for her. However, when
she attains a voice, she not only asserts her and her daughter’s presence, but also
destabilizes Santa’s identity. She does not address him as “Santa”, but “Mister.” Maud
transforms her own image when she attains ‘voice,’ for she has assumed the role of
‘subject,’ that can speak for herself and define her feelings. Brooks, in the early 1950s,
realized that African American women needed and individual ‘voice’ to assert
themselves and to transform their identity imposed by the predominant culture and the
majority. Later in the century, black feminists like, Mae Henderson and bell hooks, have
taken up this idea and emphasize the necessity for ‘voice,’ in order for to black women to
transform themselves from being the narrated to the narrator from objectivity to
subjectivity.
The changes in Maud are signified by changes in her voice, in her vocabulary, and
in her expression. We can feel suppressed anger in the language of her thoughts and
interior monologues, even when she is trying to justify what she calls, “noble
understanding,” the blamelessness of her family in preferring light color. We can feel the
anger under this poise and calmness: “It was not their fault. She understood. They could
not help it. They were enslaved, were fascinated, and they were not at all to blame”
(Black 176). Yet, Maud’s feelings are not articulated verbally, until she gives birth to
Paulette. She asserts herself and voices her authority at the time of her daughter’s birth.
In fact, timid and polite language changes into commanding and authoritative notes. She
screams at Paul, in the midst of her labor pain "DON'T YOU GO OUT OF HERE AND
LEAVE ME ALONE! Damn! Damn!" (Black 234). When her mother, who is of
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grumbling nature, enters the door, Maud makes clear to her that she is the authority in
this situation: "'Listen, if you're going to make a fuss, go on out. I'm having enough
trouble without you making a fuss over everything" (Black 237).
Most of her speeches which reveal her anger and mental conditions are in the
forms of interior monologues or loud thoughts. In them, we find military vocabulary and
aggressive tone, which sometime resorts to the expression of physical violence. When she
resolves not to return to the Burns-Coopers, she describes her action with a militaristic
expression:
One walked out from that almost perfect wall, spitting at the firing squad.
What difference did it make whether the firing squad understood or did
not understand the manner of one's retaliation or why one had to retaliate?
Why, one was a human being. (Black 305)
In the chapter entitled, "Millinery," her expression is defiant, and it reflects in her
actions and behavior. In the millinery shop, Maud’s behavior toward the white woman
and her thought, as well as the description of the narrator, tells the reader of Maud's
hatred for the whites, for their arrogance, and their sense of superiority. The narrator hints
at her state of mind when the manager of the store “rushed off to consult with the owner.
She rushed off to appeal to the boxes in the back room" (Black 298). At this moment,
Maud seems to be enjoying the plight of the manager. In this way, Maud gives vent to her
pant up anger and resentment against racism of the white majority that renders invisibility
to African American women. She is very angry with the manager’s attitude and behavior.
She wants to articulate her feelings but she lacks the effective and powerful voice to
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express her disapproval for the manager’s racism. However, through her gestures and
actions she reveals her anger, without resorting to aggressive manners or undignified
ways. Maud’s action in the Millenary shop reflects Brooks’ idea of resisting the
preexisting evils in the systems with dignity and grace, by rejecting what the system offer
in the guise of favor to the oppressed and marginalized classes. Maud’s action at the
Millenary shop may be looked at as the defiance of the value system that makes African
American women invisible, with what Melhem calls “sanity”.
Maud is pleased to see the manager running back and forth to convince her to buy
the hat. When she finally agrees to sell at the price that Maud has indicated, Maud coldly
tells her, "I've decided against the hat" (Black 298). She has made this decision to make
the manager uncomfortable and also to slight her. In this way, Maud has caused the white
saleswoman great mental agony and frustration, which is described by the narrator in the
final scene:
"What? Why, you told—But, you said—" Maud Martha went out, tenderly
closed the door. "Black—oh, black—" said the hat woman to her hats—
which, on the slender stands, shone pink and blue and white and lavender,
showed off their tassels, their sleek satin ribbons, their veils, their flower
coquettes. (Black 298-299)
In this incidence, Maud expresses her resentment for the white saleswoman’s
slight by her action and interior monologue, but her body language, as well as her
vocabulary, also shows the rage that is overflowing in her heart. However, in the Santa
episode, when Maud sees that the Santa’s action is the beginning of the lessons of
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inferiority and invisibility,” and her daughter’s happiness is at stake, she suddenly
experiences her anger as powerful enough to lead to physical violence.” She adopts an
authoritative and aggressive tone in her direct address to the Santa and also uses violent
language in her interior monologue. It is the sense of danger to her daughter’s childhood
happiness that enables Maud to find the voice and attain self-realization and selfdetermination. She contrasts her feelings of anger with the calm composure of her sister
Helen: "Helen, she thought, would not have twitched, back there. Would not have yearned
to jerk trimming scissors from the purse and jab jab jab that evading eye. Would have
gathered her fires, patted them, rolled them, and blown on them" (Black 317). The,
apparently, demurred and docile Maud of the early part of the novel is thinking what she
would do to the Santa for his treatment of Paulette and how her sister would behave in such
situation. Her monologue reveals that she considers herself a militant, who would prefer to
resort to violent action whereas her sister, Helen may overlook the matter or react calmly.
Maud’s understanding of herself also shows the progress of her consciousness, for now she
seems to have realized her potential as a human being but she never resorts to violence;
rather she tries to explain Santa’s behavior to her daughter, so that her illusion may not
shatter and loss her childhood imagination.
In Maud Martha, Brooks proves that she is aware of racial oppression and
discriminations and has not ignored the ambitions and interests of the African-Americans.
Through her heroine, she shows her community how to defy and resist the ugly social and
political practices and how to live, as best as one possibly can, with dignity and grace.
Her mode of resistance against evil in the system and racial and color discrimination is
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not to be a part of the system, or through non-cooperation. Her ideas and actions
anticipate the 1954 Supreme Court decision and the civil rights movement. Her path of
defiance, struggle, and resistance is lighted by “sanity,” not by blind rage and restraint
not by unchecked and uncontrolled passion of hatred and violence. Maud Martha is an
image of new African-American women, who may appear timid and calm on the surface,
but is aggressive and asserting when the time and situation demands it. Her aspirations,
ambitions, and ideas can be viewed as fore runners of the Combahee River Collective—
the manifesto of Black Feminism, whose main aim is “ to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white
men.” Like these black feminists of 70s and 80s, she does not believe in separation. Like
them, she believes in the peaceful co-existence and equality of both the sexes. She is a
woman who is trying to keep a delicate balance between her domestic duties and her
dreams, while at the same time looking for self-definition and self-dignity.
Brooks realizes that if African-American women want to play a positive and
constructive role in society. They must have their voice, which they can not attain till
they become the ‘subject.’ bell hooks believes that in order to come from the margin to
the center, black women must find a voice. Only then can they transform their self- image
and identity, which has been given to them by white culture and patriarchal society.
Judith Butler points out the lack of any "preexisting identity” (141) for black women or
any other woman, as well as the “fiction of the dominant gender's role”(Gery 47).
According to Butler, we can change this assigned role. Brooks understands this fact, even
in 1940s-50s. She assigns central roles to women, particularly to the mothers, in most of
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her poems. She uses them and their utterances to subvert the traditional ideas and values
and to destabilize their preexisting identities. All her works aim at changing the status of
black women and giving them power by rendering them black female subjectivity and
voice. In this way, she brings them from the margin to the center, from invisibility to
visibility, and transforms them from objects to subjects. The main agency of this
transformation is the women themselves. Their utterances herald the message of change
and their voice inspires African-American women to reconfigure a new system, in which
they will have a new image and a new language: the language of liberation.
Brooks’ Maud Martha will not be a stranger to Pakistani women, although they
may not be able to identify themselves completely with Maud, for they belong to
different social, cultural, and moral systems. However, they have some common features
in their lives: oppression, gender discrimination, and the imposed identity. In fact,
African American women and Pakistani women are oppressed and discriminated “under
different representational paradigms” (Demirturke). The oppressors of both their
communities exploit social, moral, and religious elements to render the women of their
respective community inferior status as identitiless objects and general invisibility. It will
not be problematic for Pakistani students who are interested in feminism, as well as
ordinary readers who are interested in woman’s freedom from social, moral, and cultural
taboos, to understand Maud’s social, emotional, and psychological problems, for
Pakistani women have to face almost the same kinds of problems in their own social and
cultural environment, which is, obviously, different from that of Maud. Pakistani
students of feminism resists the social values that make her inferior and invisible being,
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for Urdu feminist writers are already using unconventional images of women to defy and
resist the gender oppression and class discrimination that have made them ‘others’ and
subordinates to men. What Pakistani students need is that they have to rise above the 19th
century Eurocentric culture that stereotyped black nations as inferior people and
Victorian ideas of womanhood that they have inherited from the British Raj and which
the religious scholars and ‘protectorates’ of the social and morals values have sanctified.
These students particularly at the graduate level where the emphasis of course objective
is to analyze and comprehend form and content of a work of literature, need proper
guidance and explanation to understand African American positionality, and should be
able to view and recognize African Americans in their own social, cultural, political, and
moral context, instead of judging them by the standards imposed on them by European
and American imperialism. In this way, the students may have better insight and
understanding of African American life and literature viz-a-viz their own.
While teaching Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, the students should be
familiarized with the history of stereotyping of African-Americans, particularly of
African American women, by the white American literature and culture. The students
should also be acquainted with the methods adopted by the predominant powers and
cultures to construct “reality on the subordinated group, so that the latter group accepts
the stereotype" (Sunar 447). In this way, they will be able to look at Brooks’ female
characters in the social and historical context of African American woman’s resistance
and struggle against the predominant systems, which stereotyped them as identitiless and
invisible objects. Then, they can analyze them in relation to Pakistani women, who are
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also stereotyped as ‘non-persons,’ thus they will be looking at Brooks and her women
from multi-cultural and multi-social perspectives. Moreover, by studying how Brooks
transforms her women from the defined, to definers, they can understand, not only how
Pakistani women are made invisible members of the family as well as the society, and
made passive onlookers by gender positionality, religious culture, and social taboos, but
also Pakistani students who are feminists in colleges and universities can explore new
ideas and ways to defy and subvert, without losing their feminine dignity and grace.
Brooks, with her vision of uniting art and morality, and the feminist ideas that are
akin to Pakistani feminist sensibilities, particularly in Maud Martha, would be an
intelligent and important addition to the English literature curricular of Pakistani
academic institutions. Brooks’ concept of African American woman, her aesthetic ideas,
her unification of art and morality, and command over classical Anglo-American literary
forms can give a new dimension from which to look at literature, in general, and African
American literature, in particular, with a new concept of history, diverse theories of
feminism, and Bakhtin’s ideas of words and utterance. She can be of great interest to
Pakistani students who want to study American literature from a multi-cultural context,
because her art is a subtle blending of white and black culture and values. Pakistani
women students will hearken to her tiding of liberation of women from oppression and
injustice and her voice of protest against and subversion of preexisting systems. Pakistani
students who sympathize with the feminist movement in Pakistan, which is struggling
against gender oppression, class discrimination, stereotyping, and the atrocities
committed in the name of religion will find a supportive and sympathetic voice in
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Brooks’ Maud Martha and the women of her early poems. Her idea of the attainment of
‘voice’ by African American women for the transformation of their identity may become
the center of interest of Pakistani woman students of English/American literature.
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CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
In the previous chapters, I looked at the social, cultural, political, economic, and
moral problems of African American women in Gwendolyn Brooks’ early works in order
to analyze them in context and drawing connections to the problems that Pakistanis,
particularly, women have been facing for ages. I also explore an appropriate pedagogy to
teach Brooks works to Pakistani students. My effort, in this dissertation, has been to
demonstrate how Brooks uses women and mothers first to expose the oppression,
discrimination, and injustice that African Americans, especially the women have to face
and then to destabilize and subvert them to create an alternative system. Then I explored
how she adopts and adapts classical poetic forms to convey the message of struggle and
resistance against the oppressors and the agencies that have denigrated and stereotyped
African Americans as non-persons. I investigate how Brooks transforms the image and
role of African American women from made things to makers, from defined to definers
and from audience to speakers with the help of mother characters and by transforming the
classical poetic forms in her early poems.
In the Mecca is studied as Brooks’ effort to convey the urgent need to listen
closely to the dispossessed and speak for the voiceless, signified by the lost child, Pepita.
It also explores issue of the search for self-knowledge and self-affirmation that in turn
leads to liberation from social, cultural, economic, and political confinement. I highlight
the message that the collapse of old values and systems is possible only when the
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Meccans the down and out struggle from within. I look at Maud Martha as an idea of an
African American woman that Brooks wants to evolve, a woman with strong moral
vision and desire to live life in “creative fashion.” My purpose in performing a feminist
analysis of the problems of African American women and men in her early works is to
understand them in the context of Pakistani women who are facing similar problems in a
different social, cultural, and political environment. The voices of Brooks’ women and
mothers speak from multi-national and cross-cultural contexts.
Teaching African American literature to Pakistani students will be an interesting
project and it will be no less an adventure for the teachers than for the students, because
few African American writers are familiar for the majority of Pakistani students or even
academics. Brooks' poetry may pose new challenges to the teachers as well as students of
English language and literature because it demands new approaches and vision in
pedagogy. Still today, most of Pakistani teachers follow the pedagogy formulated by the
British educators of colonial days and hold onto Pre-Independence Colonial legacies.
They do not pay much attention to intercultural or to multi-social relations, or to the
fusing of life experience and critical-historical judgments. The present day pedagogy
demands, to properly grasp and evaluate work of literature, that the students as well as
the teachers acquire comprehensive knowledge of social, political, philosophical, and
economic currents of the time when the literature was created and “emotional as well as
intellectual powers to deal adequately with dense, polysemous texts” (Rosengarten 72).
Moreover, students should realize the need to situate literary works within the complex
and contradictory nature of historical reality, and of the specific events and trends that
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mediate the relationship between a writer and his time. A writer can be better understood
if we can relate his or her social, political, cultural, and moral experiences to the readers
own social and political experiences, problems and issues.
Some universities in Pakistan have included in their syllabi a short story or two by
Langston Hughes or a poem of Maya Angelou, or a novel of Toni Morrison, or maybe
works of some few other African American writers: but no African American writer is
taught thoroughly. To introduce African American woman writers, Gwendolyn Brooks
can be a good starting point. She is the forerunner of the Black Feminist writers of the
last three decades of the twentieth century and a successor to the Harlem Renaissance of
the 1930s and 1940s. Her work can help Pakistani students to understand the history and
progress of African American literature from the Primitivist school that marks the
beginning of Black American Literature's public role to the rise of the counter-hegemonic
Black Nationalism and the Black Feminism. Brooks can be taught effectively and
understood better if the teachers first introduce and explain the student’s social,
psychological, and political background of African Americans in the context of slavery,
racial discrimination, violence that followed the Emancipation, racial segregation, civil
right movement and the rise of Black Nationalism. In this way, the students will have
vivid insight into issues and ideas that are being raised and discussed in Brooks’ works
and also other African American writers. The teacher as well as students may analyze the
problems and issues in Brooks’ works (African American literature) in that context and
then relate them to our own social, cultural, and political context
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To truly comprehend Brooks or African American literature, Pakistani students
must confront the dominant Eurocentric culture and values that they have inherited from
The British Raj. These students need proper guidance and explanation to understand
African American positionality, and awareness of their own positionality with respect to
Eurocentric values and ideologies that have been imposed on them. Colleges and
universities in Pakistan need to include more African American writers in general, so that
the students may have deeper exposure to African American literature and better insight
into and understanding of African American positionality vis-à-vis their literature.
An awareness of the stereotyping of African-Americans by the white American
culture can help students become aware of positionality. In this way they will be able to
look at Brooks’ women characters in relation with Pakistani women who are also
stereotyped as non-persons by Pakistani social and religious culture. Pakistani students
are prepared to look at Brooks and her works from multi-cultural and multi-social
perspectives. Moreover, by studying, how Brooks transforms her women from audience
or being defined, to speakers and defining authority, they will find that they can
understand not only how Pakistani women can transform their role and identity, but also
how they are made invisible members of the family as well as the society and passive
onlookers by gender positionality, religious culture, and social taboos. They will gain
insight into how patriarchy, symbol of oppression, imposes its own constructed realities
and identity in any given culture.
Brooks’ novel, Maud Martha, and her poetic work relating to African American
women can be an interesting field of study and research for Pakistani students who are
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interested in multi- social and cross cultural feminism and the power politics of how the
dominating or empowered group is able to impose its own “construction of reality on the
subordinated group, so that the latter group accepts the stereotype" (Sunar 447). Such
research-oriented study can help the students to understand and expose what is being
concealed from victimized group and it may bring to light what the “subordinated
groups” loses. In fact, female Pakistani students, who are also a part of the subordinate
group, will come to understand that they too are being deprived of their ability to change
their image and role.
Brooks’ poetry addresses primarily African Americans, but it can be extended to
international audiences, particularly to a Pakistani audience. In the Mecca apparently
deals with the problems of poverty, miseries, and multitude of constrictions that African
Americans have to face and struggle against. But, it has broader context, as Lowney
remarks: “the struggles defining Brooks' characters are confined neither temporally nor
spatially to their lives in the Mecca.” In the light of this statement, Pakistani students may
analyze one of the theme of the poem--loss of faith in space and systems that cannot
provide security and class mobility to its dwellers in their own social and political
context. Brooks’ poem may enhance the realization of Pakistani students that women and
men need to become aware of the power that allows groups to oppress and impose the
identity of their choice on women and other weaker sections of the society; Brooks leads
her readers to the realization that this power derives not from divine ordained laws, but
from man-made realities that can be transformed. She applies the Mecca building, a
dilapidated structure as the signifier of an obsolete system that needs to be dismantled
193
from within. In this way Pakistani students gain a cross-cultural vision of the systems
which make the women tongueless, as Kishwar Naheed has described it in her poem “We
sinful women.” Like Brooks, Naheed writes on behalf of those “who find that tongues
which could speak have been severed,” the invisible members of the family and society.
When Pakistani students view Brooks’ In the Mecca in the context of Bakhtin’s ideas of
‘word’ and “dialogism,” they will realize that Brooks’ poem is not only applicable to the
African Americans of late 1960s and early 1970s, but it is also true for Pakistan of today.
Pakistani students can look at the Mecca building as the signifier of those systems, values
and ideas that have delimited their vision, restricted their thoughts, denied them their
rightful opportunities for social and economic mobility, and deprived them of their legal
and civic rights. They can also comprehend that the identity and values imposed on
women by a male-dominated society and its power groups are transient and they can be
changed. Brooks provokes them to see that in Pakistan, both men and women will have
to dismantle the structure of social and moral norms that gives authority to oppressors to
impose their monologic truth on others.
Just as Mrs. Sallie Smith’s epiphany In the Mecca makes it an effective didactic
text, the protagonist of Brooks' only novel, Maud Martha, will not be a stranger to
Pakistani readers, particularly women. Pakistani women students may not be able to align
their problems and issues completely with those being faced by Maud, for they belong to
different social, cultural, and moral systems. However, they share such common features
as--oppression, gender discrimination, and imposed identity. No doubt, African American
women and Pakistani women are oppressed and discriminated “under different
194
representational paradigms”(Demirturk). Pakistani students as well as ordinary readers
might be able to understand Maud’s social, emotional, and psychological problems for
Pakistani women have to face almost the same problems, in different social and cultural
environment. Pakistani students would be able to appreciate the way Maud defies and
resists the social values that make her an inferior and invisible being, for Urdu feminist
writers are already using classical forms and unconventional images of women to defy
and resist gender oppression and class discrimination. Furthermore, by introducing
Brooks’ works in the curricula of Pakistani colleges and universities, young feminists
can gain encouragement in the realization that they are not alone in the world which
exploits through “intricately built-in stereotypes for brainwashing as the Other”
(Demirturk). At the same time, the study of Brooks or other ethnic American literature
will open new dimensions in their approach to feminist issues; for they will have realized
that they are a part of broader movement.
The introduction of African American literature, especially Gwendolyn Brooks
and others like her into the curricula of Pakistani education institutions demands some
changes in approaches to established ways of understanding and interpreting literary
works. It can initiate the opening up of a curricular space for teaching about American
literature, particularly that of ethnic women writers of the United States. For those who
recognize the importance of infusing multiple perspectives into the studies of literature,
the inclusion of the literature written in English by various ethnic groups from different
part of the world in the curricular will seem indispensable. But it demands significant
changes in research and teaching methodology in an educational system such as that of
195
Pakistan, which has been following Victorian models but may now be ready for the
change in the system. New approaches to teaching literature necessitate certain shifts in
teachers' attitudes as well as in the students' reception of the work.
First, the teacher who is teaching Gwendolyn Brooks, or any other African
American writer, needs to situate him or herself in terms of social location. After that the
teacher should try to help the students by making them understand the work in a crosscultural context. In this approach, the teacher as well as the students will have to change
"a location of privilege" (hooks, Teaching 82). It means that they should shift their
positionality from white Euro-American centered criteria to multi-cultural and multiethnic approach. American literature deserves more extensive exploration in the
curricula of Pakistani universities, for what we are imparting to the students about
American literature today is only the tip of the iceberg. Pakistani students need to know
more about diverse aspects of American literature if they want to learn about American
life and culture in its totality, not only that represented by white Americans . Although
we find a few white American writers in the various syllabi of Pakistani universities, we
still need to include many more African American writers, particularly woman writers,,
so that we may have more variegated picture. By studying the social, cultural, and
economic life of minorities, particularly of women, students could realize that these
groups are facing similar kinds of social, psychological, and emotional problems that
Pakistani particularly women are facing. They can interrelate their experiences and
problems to those of other people who may be undergoing almost the same experiences
and facing similar problems. With this shift, the students will not look at African
196
American literature with a Eurocentric lens; they will need to discard the Arnoldian
yardstick or Victorian morality to judge works of literature.
However radical in some respects, Brooks is a particularly good candidate for
expanding the canon of American literature in Pakistan; with her vision of uniting art and
morality, versatility in poetic forms, and the feminist ideas complementing those of
Pakistani feminists. In addition, her work is appropriate in a curriculum grounded in the
study of English for the purpose of teaching language usage. Her clever and subtle
blending of elevated language with vernacular and coining of new words basing on
vernacular usage may be of great interest. Her juztaposing of classical syntax and African
American sentence construction can give new ideas to learners and teachers of English in
Pakistan whose pedagogical norm is British Standard English (BSE). Now they have
varieties of English that are recognized and in use in many parts of the world as the
medium of communication in business and political forums, apart from the British
Standard English In this way Pakistani students and the common people who speak
English in day-to-day life will be decolonizing the mode of thinking about the colored
people, ’other’ and destabilizing the hegemony and domination of British Standard
English in Pakistani and importing something valuable for their educational institutions,
life, and culture.
197
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